Purpose-built themes
There are many ways to publish content on the web. Github pages offers a no-cost option for publishing your work online in a place that it is easily discovered by readers. There is also a growing community of developers who are working to meet the needs of academic publishing and communications. With purpose-built themes, you can create sites that better suit your project.
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One of the tri-co’s main experts on academic publishing using Jekyll is Nabil Kashyap. Nabil frequently uses the pixyll theme or minimal-mistakes for his sites.
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The online-cv theme has the formatting and layout for your CV.
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Here is an example course site from Swarthmore by Professor Rachel Sagner Buurma, English 035: The Rise of the Novel (and the rise of social media)
You can change the theme of your site to any publicly available theme on GitHub. You are not limited to the themese offered when you first created your github pages site.
1) Find a theme that suits your purposes here
2) Having activated GitHub pages (see earlier section), go to your repository and find the _config.yml file.
3) Click on the file and then click on the pencil icon to Edit this file
4) Add a line to the file like this remote_theme: minicomp/ed. Here minicomp is the author’s name and ed is the repository name.
Alex Gil and Marii Nyrop at Columbia University Libraries have developed two custom themes for academic purposes.
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Ed a Jekyll theme designed for textual editors based on minimal computing principles, and focused on legibility, durability, ease and flexibility. Ed is well suited for online publication. The font is dignified and readable. There is a simple side navbar.
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Wax is a theme for producing scholarly exhibitions with minimal computing principles. It is well suited for collections of images and other visual materials. This could be photographs of archival documents, photographs or digital art. Wax is an excellent alternative to Omeka for curated exhibits and collections.
If you are interested in learning more about the features of these themes and their philosophy of minimal computing, Alex and Marii and teaching a course at the Penn DReAM Lab on June 10-14, 2019.