Updated Website UI

It has been a long time since I have posted anything on this site as life has been busy lately (work, getting married, buying a house and the birth of our son). One thing that has been on my mind is to update the look of this web site. Ever since I moved this web site from wordpress to Jekyll I have been using the minima theme for this site as it is the default theme for new jekyll sites. I was (for the most part) happy with how the site looked but felt that there was just too much white space which made the site feel too bland! I needed to add a little bit more color to it, and thus began my search for a jekyll theme that met picky my needs!

Searching the internet for jekyll themes was harder then I had anticipated as there were many themes to choose from. There were a ton of themes to choose from and since I had some free time on my hands, I decided to go thru the ones that I liked! Below you will find links to a few of the themes that caught my attention:

• Dbyll - I really liked the side bar on this site. But felt that the UI components that were part of this theme were just a bit too much for my taste.
• Minimal Mistakes - Very good looking theme, but the dependencies really turned me off to this theme (I also wanted some color to my site that this theme could not give me without me making changes to it).
• Clean Blog - This bootstrap based theme was nice, I really liked the background images at the top of each post.
• Kasper - The author of this theme has duplicated the default ghost theme (ghost being a publishing platform). I really liked the theme, but in the end it just felt a bit too bland for me.

After searching for a few days I found the Voyager Jekyll Theme which met my needs of having a simple, yet beautiful looking web site. One of the things I really loved about this theme is how easy it was to plug it into my site. All I had to do was just make some minor changes to the layouts and renamed some folders and I was done! There are still some other minor changes I have to make to the site to get it just the way I like it, but I think that for the foreseeable future this will be the theme I’ll use for this site!

One other cool thing that happened when I was migrating this site to this new theme was me learning more about the Liquid Templating Engine. I now feel more comfortable updating this site to make it fit my needs!