Working With Millennial

Millennial was designed to be a minimalist theme in order for the focus to remain on your content.

Layouts

There are two main layout options that are included with Millennial: post and page. Layouts are specified through the YAML front block matter. Any file that contains a YAML front block matter will be processed by Jekyll. For example:

---
layout: post
title: "Example Post"
---

Examples of what posts looks like can be found in the _posts directory, which includes this post you are reading right now. Posts are the basic blog post layout, which includes a header image, post content, author name, date published, social media sharing links, and related posts.

Pages are essentially the post layout without and of the extra features of the posts layout. An example of what pages look like can be found at the About and Contacts.

In addition to the two main layout options above, there are also custom layouts that have been created for the home page and the archives page. These are simply just page layouts with some Liquid template code. Check out the index.html and writing.md files in the root directory for what the code looks like.

YAML Front Block Matter

The recommended YAML front block is:

---
layout:
title:
categories:
tags: []
image:
  feature:
  teaser:
  credit:
  creditlink:

---

layout specifies which layout to use, title is the page or post title, categories can be used to better organize your posts, tags are used to show related posts, as well as indicate what topics are related in a given post, and image specifies which images to use. There are two main types of images that can be used in a given post, the feature and the teaser, which are typically the same image, except the teaser image is cropped for the home page. You can give credit to images under credit, and provide a link if possible under creditlink.

Links

Links are signified mainly through an underline text-decoration, in order to maximize the perceived affordance of clickability (I originally just wanted to make the links a darker shade of grey).

Images

Images were designed to be 1024x600 pixels.

Disqus

Lagrange supports comments at the end of posts through Disqus. In order to activate Disqus commenting, set disqus.comments to true in the settings.yml file under _data. If you do not have a Disqus account already, you will have to set one up, and create a profile for your website. You will be given a disqus_shortname that will be used to generate the appropriate comments sections for your site. More information on how to set up Disqus.

Google Analytics

It is possible to track your site statistics through Google Analytics. Similar to Disqus, you will have to create an account for Google Analytics, and enter the correct Google ID for your site under google-ID in the settings.yml file. More information on how to set up Google Analytics.

RSS Feeds

Atom is supported through Jekyll-Feed and RSS 2.0 is supported through RSS autodiscovery.

Social Media icons

All social media icons are courtesy of Font Awesome. You can change which icons appear, as well as the account that they link to, in the settings.yml file in the _data folder.