A New Look

I have moved my personal site (this site, rdavidreid.com) over to a new custom Jekyll theme. I built it for a few reasons:

  1. I think having your own custom site comes off as a little more professional than using one off the shelf (especially if you are a web developer)
  2. I wanted complete control over the layout. The old theme I was using is great, but there were some things I wanted to behave differently.
  3. I wanted an identical design language across multiple websites, but also wanted each website to be custom enough that it’s obvious when you leave one site and go to another. rdavidreid.com and linkidex.com/blog looked identical, which I think made it a little jarring when going from one site and reading about technical release notes and updates and then swapping to the other and seeing high protein meal prep recipes.

That all said, I wanted to keep using Jekyll.rb. Jekyll has been treating me great so far. I’m a huge fan of writing in markdown and having all of the formatting and ‘html stuff’ just taken care of by Jekyll. There are alternatives to Jekyll that do the same thing, but at this time I have no reason to consider switching.

Introducing Jekyll Prism

Disclaimer: I may change the name.

Prism makes it easy to support multiple different and custom color palettes. This means you can deploy multiple sites with Jekyll Prism and by swapping out one word in the color_scheme config within _config.yml give each site a unique look.

Prism also allows you to have different pages located at the root /, by swapping out the home_layout variable within _config.yml

  • I have home_layout set to portfolio on rdavidreid.com.
  • I’ll be setting it to blog on linkidex.com/blog, which lets me use Prism just for Linkidex’s blog and not make things confusing between having linkidex.com being a web application and linkidex.com/blog being a static Jekyll blog.
  • For other websites, I can set home_layout to be landing, and the root directory / will be a landing page.

There are other differences with Prism compared to other popular themes, but to summarize: this custom theme is built exclusively for my needs, instead of being a general theme that tries to fit everyone’s needs. So far, I’m quite happy with it.

I’ll probably make Prism public in the future so other people can use it, but I’m not prioritizing that right now. At the time of this writing I have 3 other websites to convert to Prism and I’d like to have Prism live in production for a while before sharing it with other people. I think there is an extra layer of diligence and planning that should go into code before one has other people start using their code as a foundation to build other stuff on top of. Right now Prism has been built just for my needs. There is extra work I would want to do before suggesting other people should use it too. That said, if you love Prism and super want to use it right now, reach out to me and we can figure something out.

Anyway, hello world, this is Prism.