Blog ThemeBlog themes are the perfect Jekyll themes to use if you're looking to start your own blog, they're optmized for readability, so you can focus on writing.
Free ThemeFree themes are perfect if you're just starting out with Jekyll. Since they're free, you don't have to worry about choosing the wrong theme.
Github Pages ThemeThese Jekyll themes all work great with Github Pages, allowing you to quickly get your site live without any hassle.
Helium is a fast, modern and configurable Jekyll theme with some tricks up it’s sleeve. It has a live theme switcher and it’s main blog layout display prominent hero images for posts with colored overlays and nice animations.
Bootstrap theme source

Features
Though minimalistic-looking by nature, dactl is easily configurable and includes quite a lot of niceties:
Main features:
Jekyll-specific features:
Other features:
- Blog page
- Landing page samples
- Tags functionality and tags pages
- Link posts functionality
- Mobile slider scrolling
- Emoji support ⚡️⚡️⚡️ by copy paste from getemoji
Some of the features listed above can be easily configured or disabled by you.
At it’s core, dactl is a forked version of sentenza but it has been almost entirely rewritten from scratch.
I have just started my journey in the world of web development, learning new things on the way.
Looking for a way to put my newly acquired skills to test I found Jekyll and I quickly realized that it’s going to be a good learning experience since I don’t like building ‘dummy’ projects.
I’ve built this theme as a way to develop my skills further.
You can find credits at the bottom of this Readme file.
All feedback is welcome, both positive and negative.
Installation
Running locally
Assuming you’ve got Jekyll installed, clone or download this repo, cd
into the folder and run jekyll serve
.
Hosting on GitHub
Fork this repo and rename it to yourusername.github.io
… and edit the _config.yaml
file whit your github address and your links (such as social media username, email, name, ecc.)!
Your new helium-themed Jekyll blog should be up and running at yourusername.github.io.
Hero images and blog layout
Liquid ‘script’ which is used to append correct hero image and overlay color as set in post YAML Front matter was written by me and while it’s really basic it functions properly.
You can read more about it and see the code in include/utils/hero.html
.
Tags & Tags Pages
Tags and tag pages are supported by using Jekyll’s native collections functionality.
Credits
Resources used
Inspiration and thoughtful code-jacking
Inspiration and bits of things listed below are present inside dactl’s code:
- Daktilo - dactl is based on Daktilo and inherits it’s one-column layout.
- Hydejack - I’ve learned a lot about Jekyll when I took apart @qwtel’s excellent fork of Hyde theme. I embraced his more partials = everything is easier to edit policy. Hydejack theme gave me an idea on how to create hero images liquid scripting, loading google fonts and using rem’s/em’s and more.
- Minimal Mistakes - This guy makes awesome themes and writes a lot about Jekyll and it’s more obscure use cases on his blog, Made Mistakes. Looking through his theme’s code - Minimal Mistakes in particular - gave me lot of information about how to build a robust theme and how to make it configurable within
_config.yml
- Trophy - Link border slide animation SASS mixin which I slightly modified to be able to easily change the direction of the animation.
- Various blog posts about Jekyll and Stackoverflow posts with useful Liquid snippets.
License
All parts of helium Jekyll theme are free to use and abuse under the open-source MIT license.