Pasithea0's Microblog Template

This site is built with Jekyll and uses a simple, clean design focused on readability. The content is written in Markdown and automatically compiled into web pages. It takes (a lot of) inspiration from stephango.com with some modifications and my own design touch.

Preview: https://pasithea0.github.io/microblog-template/

Features:

• Markdown content with support for images, quotes, and lists. Designed to support Obsidian-style fontmatter and attachments
• Auto-generated thumbnails for social media sharing
• Reading time calculation for each post
• Tag-based topic pages
• Responsive design for mobile and desktop
• Static site generation for GitHub Pages

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Ruby (with gem)
• pnpm
• ImageMagick (for thumbnail generation)

Installation

1. Install Jekyll and Bundler:

   gem install jekyll bundler

2. Install dependencies:

   bundle install

3. Install ImageMagick (required for thumbnail generation):

   # macOS
   brew install imagemagick
   
   # Ubuntu/Debian
   sudo apt-get install imagemagick
   
   # Windows (using Chocolatey)
   choco install imagemagick

Development

Start the development server with live reload:

pnpm run dev

The site will be available at http://localhost:4000

Available Scripts

• pnpm run dev - Start development server with live reload
• pnpm run build - Build the site for production
• pnpm run serve - Start a simple server (without live reload)
• pnpm run clean - Clean the build directory and thumbnails
• pnpm run generate-thumbnails - Generate PNG thumbnails for social media sharing

Thumbnail Generation

Important: Thumbnails MUST be generated manually on your device before deployment. The build process no longer automatically generates thumbnails.

Start by adding thumb.png and favicon.ico to the assets folder. the favicon will be converted to png automatically.

To generate thumbnails for your posts:

1. Ensure ImageMagick is installed (see Prerequisites)
2. Run the thumbnail generation command:

   pnpm run generate-thumbnails

3. This will create both SVG and PNG versions of thumbnails in assets/thumbnails/:
   • Individual post thumbnails: {post-slug}.svg and {post-slug}.png
   • Site thumbnail: site-thumbnail.svg and site-thumbnail.png (used for home page and other non-post pages)
4. The PNG versions are used for social media sharing (iMessage, Twitter, etc.)

Note: Thumbnails are only generated in production mode (JEKYLL_ENV=production) to ensure proper image encoding and conversion.

Adding Content

Start by editing _config.yml to set your site's title, description, and other settings.

• Long-form writings: Create new files in _writing/ with layout: post in the fontmater
• Microblog posts: Create new files in _microblog/ with layout: micro in the fontmater
• Requirements: All notes require a date fontmater. For example: created: 2025-09-05. These options are avaliable and the date priority is: updated > created > published
• Attachments: Add all attachments/image to assets/attachments/, link them in the post with ![[/attachments/{filename}]] syntax
• Pages: Create HTML or Markdown files in the root directory
• Styles: Add CSS files to assets/css/, randomize options are in default.html
• Layouts: Create new layouts in _layouts/

Bonus Features

• robots.txt and RSL standard to reject AI scraping/indexing
• PGP page to share your public key
• Two separate RSS feeds for long-form writings and microblog posts
• Multiple CSS styles, including a Minecraft theme
• Email button that acts as a "comment" button, linking to the current post