Jekyll and Hyde: How to use Jekyll and Hydejack to create a blog site

Why use Jekyll?

GitHub Pages is a great way to create a blog site. The advantages are:

• It is free: If you have a github account, you can have one personal github page for free as long as the domain name is [github user id].github.io.

• Maintained by github: You don’t have to worry about version control, building, deploying, and all the headaches with the website maintenance. All these are done by github. Did I mention that they are free?

• Easy to setup: GitHub uses Jekyll which transforms Markdown files which are basically plain text files into beautiful blogs.

Which Jekyll theme to use?

The easiest way to setup a github page is to use one of the Jekyll themes. A Jekyll theme is a style template that the users can customize. For choosing a theme, I had the requirements:

1. Simple design: I am a minimalist or at least I strive to be a minimalist so I hate any design that is overly complicated and flashy. I believe that the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) design principle is the best user experience.

2. Easy to customize: Simplicity is the guiding principle, but it needs to be easy to customize and add necessary features later.

3. Search function: I have two other blogging sites that I still maintain for quite sometime and I found that without search functionality, you cannot find the content you need. So search function is an absolute necessity.

Based on these requirements, I searched a few themes. Here were a few candidates:

1. FastAI: This was the first theme I tried and actually used for a while. It was easy to setup and allows easy publishing of Jupyter notebooks. The downside is that it is a boilerplate that is hard to customize. I cannot find a good way to categorize the articles, for instance, and the search function was not there.

2. Beautiful Jekyll: Beautiful Jekyll had all the features I needed except the search function. There should derivative themes that should have the search function, but I found a better solution so I did not go for this one.

3. jdh8: The theme is the WordPress twenty-sixteen theme ported over to Jekyll. I liked WordPress twenty-sixteen template and still using it for my other blog site. The downside is still the search funciton.

In the end, I settled on zzsza because it has all the features I needed. Internally, almost all of these themes are built upon Hydejack which is another Jekyll theme and so is the reason for the title of this article: Jekyll and Hyde.

How to setup?

I followed the guideline of Beautiful Jekyll to setup the site.

1. Clone the theme
2. Change the repo name to [user id].github.io in your github.
3. Modify and customize to your needs
4. Commit and push.

The blog site is available within a few seconds.