The Hacker Theme, Shark Edition ☕

This is an updated version of The Hacker-Blog Theme which itself is a modified version of Hacker Theme, a minimalistic, responsive jekyll theme built for hackers.

In this edition of the Hacker Theme:

✔ Some parts of page styles are edited and enhanced and some additional features such as post tags, site footer, responsive classes, post references, additional social media options, additional post categories... are added.

✔ Multiple bugs in the original theme are fixed.

✔ Updates and improvements are constantly coming, and new bugs are getting fixed when found.

All changes are made with ❤, Feel free to use this updated edition.

Technology Introduction

Jekyll is a very fast static site generator technology that's supported by Github-Pages by default. It takes text written in your favorite markup language and uses layouts to create a static website. Jekyll is written in Ruby.

Gems

Gems are code you can include in Ruby projects. Gems package specific functionality. You can share gems across multiple projects or with other people. Gems can perform actions like:

• Converting a Ruby object to JSON
• Pagination
• Interacting with APIs such as GitHub

Jekyll is a gem. Many Jekyll plugins are also gems, including jekyll-feed, jekyll-seo-tag and jekyll-archives.

Gemfile

A Gemfile is a list of gems used by your site. Every Jekyll site has a Gemfile in the main folder.

You can create your own personal website, Weblog... by one of your code repositories using [Github-Pages](https://docs.github.com/en/pages).

The default theme used in a new Jekyll project is Minima.

Usage

There are three different methods to use a custom, pre-built Jekyll theme on your project:

1. Using Remote Theme Gem Files (in Gemfile file), in this method, your theme is automatically updated whenever the original theme builder updates her/his theme files. I don't like it this way because you are dependent on a foreign repository for your websites and if you have updates in your code, you might get a conflict with the new updated theme files in the original repository. And also you don't have full control and customization option on your project.

2. Using a Local Theme and make Github Pages to use theme Gem files. Github can also make your pages on the fly with Jekyll technology.

The downside is Github-Pages only supports a limited number of themes that you can choose, each theme has its own Gem files and not all Gem files are supported by Github Pages, so you cannot use every Jekyll theme that you see online. If you like one of the themes that Github-Pages supports, use this method.

3. Use whatever Jekyll theme you see and like on the web with any custom Gem files then Jekyll build your website locally, preferably on a different branch, for example mine is named gh-pages branch, then use this branch instead of master/main branch for Github pages website, in this branch you have the Jekyll built website files: no Ruby Gem files and only html (no Markdown md files either).

In other words in this way you work with two branches, the main/master branch is used for your local editing and website changes and seeing your changes locally with bundle exec Jekyll serve command, then when finished editing, build your website with bundle exec Jekyll build (always use bundler to handle your Gem file dependencies and avoid dependency hell), then your website files are ready in a _site folder, use the contents of this folder in your second branch (for example gh-pages) for your website files.

Notes

1. Always use a local clone to work on your project using a text editor and git or github desktop then commit and push your changes to your online Github Repositories. You can also edit it directly on Github but it is recommended that you do most of your changes in a local build.

2. You can use your custom domain with Github-Pages.

3. You can use CloudFlare or Namecheap as your nameserver provider for your custom domain. CloudFlare has also nice security and firewall features and it is also a caching proxy that speeds up your website speed.

4. For more info on how to create your website using Github-Pages and Jekyll themes use the following resources:

• https://docs.github.com/en/pages

• https://jekyllrb.com/docs/ and for more themes and resources: https://jekyllrb.com/resources/

• https://medium.com/@samdutton/github-pages-cloudflare-custom-domain-checklist-e86c786194a4

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWzwUIYZpnJuT0sH4BN56P5oWTdHJiTNq

License

CC0 1.0 Universal