Switching to a Modern Blog Theme
I recently switched my blog’s theme from minima to a forked version of the Mediumish Jekyll theme, a fantastic full featured Jekyll website theme released by Sal. This theme is based on Bootstrap, is wonderfully responsive and best of all, released under a permissive MIT license. Huge props to the author for releasing such a beautiful and functional theme with a permissive license.
The original theme has number of dependencies on third party services that could be liabilities in today’s legal environment for simple personal blogs. Some features in the original are also in my opinion not suitable for simple static blogs that can be hosted on Github pages. So I have stripped out those components and made some fixes for better scalability. You can find the forked theme here.
Key Changes
Third Party Dependencies removed
- Ad Sense
- Disqus
- Gravataar
Jekyll Plugins un-supportd by Github Pages removed
- jekyll-toc
- jekyll-archive
Other Changes
- Loading JQuery from offical CDN vs. serving loacally
- Removed lazy loading of styles & font
- Removed Lunr search - client side search acoss lots of posts inefficient
- Star Rating - not very useful without server backend
- Outdated social sharing URLs fixed, Reddit sharing added
- Added an Email button & added conditional check for Follow
Since this is not a gem based theme, to use it you need to manually clone the theme repository, copy over your posts and make some manual changes to configuration. However, the result is highly worth the effort.
