Jekyll Theme Nixer

The even more barebones cousin of the barebones theme “Nix” for Jekyll. It is optimized for fast build speeds as well.

Its purpose is to be a hard-core minimalist, single-author theme while not displaying anything more than just the content of posts and a list of posts.

It also changes as little as possible from the default browser settings to improve legibility.

Demo

It is meant for people, who are aware that nobody is using RSS feeds anymore. Either because they don't know what they are or how to use them, or they replaced Google Reader with Social Media. So all visitors are coming from search engines – let's be honest, Google – and won't read other posts, unless they are linked in the post itself.

And people coming from hacker news or related sites know how to change the URL in the browser's address bar.

If you think this goes too far, use the above mentioned Jekyll theme “Nix” instead.

Limited Features

• Dark mode, because we want to be respectful
• Posts, but no backlink to homepage
• No Pages, except custom error pages
• No visible dates, authors, categories, or tags on posts and pages
• No header or footer
• No pagination for the home page
• No feeds
• A sitemap.xml, because search engines should index us properly
• No semantic info like Open Graph, Twitter cards, JSON-LD, or Microdata

Feature Creep and Bloat

To have titles with proper spelling in the post list, you have to have a title in your front matter. You can leave it out, but then some characters cannot be displayed, most notably the apostrophe (') or anything, which cannot reasonably put in the post's filename.

Rest assured, this is the only bloat, as we already removed the date with the rest from the front matter, because it can reliably taken from the post's filename for internal processing. And who has time to post more than once a day, anyway.

Minutiae

Default Colors

The default colors are the colors of the respective browsers, both in light mode and in dark mode.

Favicon

icon.webp is the favicon for the light mode, and there's also a dark variant icon-dark.webp for dark mode. If you want to use them, these files have to be copied manually from the demo's repository root to your site's repository root.

Nixer?

“Nix” is the grammatically incorrect form of the German “nichts”, which in English means “nothing”. It's colloquially used to stress the nothingness. “Nixer” is the even more grammatically incorrect comparative of that, which colloquially may or may not being used at all.

Or, if you will, it could be UNIX without the “U”, because of the theme's somewhat archaic properties, but even more archaic.

Installation

Installation from Gem is recommended, but using a remote theme is also possible, even though it will increase build times a little, depending on your internet connection and the size of the theme download, because it will be downloaded during each build. Gems are installed locally.

GitHub Pages gem users need to use the remote theme method.

Installation from Gem

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-theme-nixer", group: [:jekyll_plugins]

Then run bundle in your terminal.

bundle

Also add the theme to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

theme: jekyll-theme-nixer

Make sure that this is the only theme: in _config.yml, and that there are no other remote-theme:.

Installation as Remote Theme

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-remote-theme", group: [:jekyll_plugins]

Then run bundle in your terminal.

bundle

Finally add the remote theme to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

remote_theme: michaelnordmeyer/jekyll-theme-nixer

Make sure that this is the only remote_theme: in _config.yml, and that there are no other theme:.

Styled Sitemap.xml

A sitemap.xsl is included in the theme to style the sitemap.xml while being displayed in the browser. For a standard Jekyll installation, they work out-of-the-box if both files are copied to the Jekyll directory.