I really wanted a minimalistic, simple theme for my blog. After looking around a bit I settled on Scribbish, a popular theme in the Ruby world with packages for Typo, Mephisto, and WordPress. Unfortunately there's no package for Jekyll so I decided to try and port it myself.

Both Mephisto and Jekyll use the Liquid templating engine so the port was pretty straightforward. It's still a work-in-progress but the basics are finished.

Jekyll has an include tag to create reusable components but, unlike Mephisto's, you can't directly pass variables to the included file. This is fairly easy to workaround by using Liquid's assign tag or explicitly looping over a collection of objects instead of using Mephisto's shortcuts. For example:

Jekyll {% for post in site.posts %} {% include post.html %} {% endfor %}

Mephisto {% include 'article' with articles %}

The Jekyll include tag looks for an _includes directory at the root source directory. However, if you try to use the include tag from an already included file there's a bug where it looks for _includes/_includes/included_file.html. To workaround this for now I just created a symlink in the _includes directory to itself. cd _includes && ln -s . _includes

Take a look at this blog's source, particularly the _layouts and _includes directories, if you'd like to use the Scribbish theme for your own Jekyll-based blog.