This is a portfolio Jekyll theme built from the ground up, using the DevTips Starter Kit as a foundation for starting, and following closely the amazing tutorial by Travis Neilson over at DevTips. For a guide on how to start a blog or personal website using Jekyll and GitHub Pages, please check out this article.
To start using this theme right away, fork the repository. From there, you can rename the repository to USERNAME.github.io, where USERNAME is your GitHub username, and edit the _config.yml and _settings.yml file (in the _data folder) to your liking. Ensure that you have a branch named gh-pages. Your website should be ready immediately at http://USERNAME.github.io.
Head over to the _posts directory to view all the blog posts that are currently on the website, and to see examples of what post files generally look like. Project content is added in the projects folder. You can simply just duplicate the template posts and start adding your own content.
For a full local installation of this theme, download your own copy of the Portfolio Jekyll Theme and unzip it into it’s own directory. From there, open up your favorite command line tool, and enter jekyll serve. Your site should be up and running locally at http://localhost:4000.
You will find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.
To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works. If you already have a website built with Jekyll, simply copy over your posts.
To change site settings, edit the _config.yml file found in the root of your repository and the _settings.yml file found in the _data folder. Anything under Site Settings can be tweaked to your liking.
If you are hosting your site on GitHub Pages, then committing a change to the _config.yml file will force a rebuild of your site with Jekyll. Any changes made should be viewable soon after. If you are hosting your site locally, then you must run jekyll serve again for the changes to take place.
In the _settings.yml file, you’ll be able to change the title of your site along with any tagline you want, which shows up in the site header, as well as the description of your site for SEO purposes. You can also change the social media information, and add your own social media icons.
Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.
This theme is completely free and open source software. You may use it however you want, as it is distributed under the MIT License. If you are having any problems, any questions or suggestions, feel free to tweet at me, or file a GitHub issue.