Notebook

Migration to Minimal Mistakes Theme

Migration to Minimal Mistakes Theme

What Changed

✅ Completed

  1. Theme: Migrated from jekyll-theme-minimal to minimal-mistakes-jekyll
  2. Gemfile: Updated with Minimal Mistakes dependencies including jekyll-include-cache
  3. _config.yml: Completely reconfigured for Minimal Mistakes with:
    • Author profile with bio and social links
    • Navigation configuration
    • Category and tag archives using liquid (GitHub Pages compatible)
    • Proper defaults for posts and pages
  4. Navigation: Created _data/navigation.yml with main menu
  5. Pages: Created new _pages/ directory with:
    • blog.md - Blog archive page
    • categories.md - Category archive page
    • tags.md - Tag archive page
    • projects.md - Projects collection page
    • about.md - About page in markdown
  6. Layouts: Removed custom layouts (now using Minimal Mistakes built-in layouts)
  7. Plugins: Removed custom plugins (GitHub Pages doesn’t support them)
  8. Old directories: Removed blog/, categories/, tags/, about/, faceted/

📋 What You Need to Do

  1. Push to GitHub: Commit and push all changes 
    git add .
git commit -m "Migrate to Minimal Mistakes theme"
git push origin main

  2. Wait for GitHub Pages: It may take a few minutes for GitHub Pages to rebuild

  3. Optional Customizations:
    • Change theme skin in _config.yml (line 2): minimal_mistakes_skin: "default"
      • Options: “air”, “aqua”, “contrast”, “dark”, “dirt”, “neon”, “mint”, “plum”, “sunrise”
    • Add your profile image to /assets/images/ and update author.avatar path
    • Customize colors by adding custom CSS in /assets/css/main.scss

🎨 Theme Features Now Available

  • ✅ Responsive design
  • ✅ Author profile sidebar
  • ✅ Social sharing buttons
  • ✅ Related posts
  • ✅ Table of contents (TOC) for long posts
  • ✅ Read time estimates
  • ✅ Category and tag archives
  • ✅ Search functionality
  • ✅ Comments support (configure if needed)
  • ✅ Analytics support (configure if needed)

📝 Post Front Matter

Your existing posts will work, but you can enhance them with Minimal Mistakes features:

---
layout: single  # Already set as default
title: "Your Post Title"
date: 2025-10-07
categories: [Category1, Category2]
tags: [tag1, tag2, tag3]
# Optional enhancements:
toc: true  # Table of contents (enabled by default)
toc_sticky: true  # Sticky TOC (enabled by default)
header:
  image: /assets/images/header.jpg  # Header image
  teaser: /assets/images/teaser.jpg  # Teaser for archive pages
excerpt: "Custom excerpt text"  # Override auto-generated excerpt
---

🔧 Troubleshooting

If something doesn’t look right after deployment:

  1. Check GitHub Pages build status in your repository settings
  2. Ensure all paths in _config.yml are correct
  3. Make sure remote_theme: mmistakes/minimal-mistakes is set correctly
  4. Clear browser cache to see latest changes

📚 Resources

Backup Files

If you need to revert or reference old files:

  • _layouts.backup/ - Original custom layouts
  • _includes.backup/ - Original custom includes