As part of setting up a personal blog, I spent a fair amount of time trying out applications (including WriteFreely) and several static-site generators (including Jekyll and Hugo).

I settled on using Jekyll as I didn't want to use yet-another-application on one of my servers, I liked the idea of simply writing posts in Markdown, using Git for versioning, and it can be hosted through GitHub Pages or other similar services.

The next step in the process was to find a theme that I liked and it was easy to customize and extend. The default Minima ticked most of my boxes, though I wanted to change the default fonts and add the ability to display post tags.

For the default font, I had to go with the [IBM Plex] family of fonts; as, IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono have become the go-to font for almost everything that I have built. Thus, the theme includes skins that use either IBM Plex Sans or IBM Plex Serif, along with light and dark-theme variations.

I also wanted a way to list out the tags that are included in the front matter of posts and provide a way to list out the different tags and categories that have been used. I used Long Qian's blog post as a starting point and extended it to include categories (as their post focused on tags). For the time being, I am manually generating the files; but, their post includes a link to a tag generator script that I could potentially use and expand upon.

If you want to try out the theme with your Jekyll install, you can add the following to the Gemfile for your Jekyll installation:

gem "minima-plex", ">= 0.1.1", git: "https://github.com/questionlp/minima-plex.git"

And, in your _config.yml file, you can either set the theme as theme: minima-plex or remote_theme: questionlp/minima-plex.

You can also checkout the theme's repository at https://github.com/questionlp/minima-plex and a demo site at https://questionlp.github.io/minima-plex.