After a morning of wrestling with Jekyll themes, skins and custom CSS, I’m finally confortable with the customization level I wanted with this blog. I’ve discovered a few things:

  • Jekyll theming doesn’t always play nicely with GitHub Pages thanks to the version mismatches
  • You usually have to select the pre-made Jekyll theme much earlier in the build process (leading me to stick with just using the default Minima theme with custom CSS)
  • The “skins” feature of the Minima theme arrived with Minima v3.0, and the default will load v2.5.1

All said and done, you should follow this readme to overload custom CSS on Minima v2.5 on a similar default Jekyll build for GitHub. While it was a bit more work than I expected, it was a nice learning experience that will let me be a bit more hands-on with the blog layout. And with a little CSS tweaking, I finally have a “dark theme” on this blog, which is what I was going for.