So far, our static site isn’t looking like anything too special. There are a couple of ways that we can spruce up the look and feel of our site.
We’ll start by adding a theme, doing some custom css, and adding more than one page. There’s a lot more that you can do beyond this. Each theme will have documentation for how to adapt that theme, allowing you to add custom footers or headers, google analytics etc.
You can also download Jekyll directly onto your own computer and set it up from there to work with GitHub Pages. This requires more in depth knowledge of both Jekyll and GitHub. If this interests you, you can check out the Research Commons materials on Introduction to Jekyll and Introduction to Git and GitHub. To see when workshop on these are offered, check out the Upcoming Events section of the Research Commons website, or sign up to their newsletter to get notifications.
Before we move on, let’s review the YAML front matter block. As mentioned before, YAML is basically a series of key value pairs and is wrapped by three dashes --- placed at the top of your document:
---
title: About
---
YAML is space sensitive, so no spaces before the key, one space after the colon, and if you need to indent, an indent consists of two spaces.