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 (generated during CI build)
• Reading time calculation for each post
• Tag-based topic pages
• Responsive design for mobile and desktop
• Static site generation for GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Ruby (with gem)
• pnpm

Installation

1. Install Jekyll and Bundler:

   gem install jekyll bundler

2. Install dependencies:

   bundle install

Development

Start the development server with live reload:

pnpm run dev

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

Deploying

Thumbnails are auto-generated during CI — no local steps needed.

Cloudflare Pages:

Set your build command in the CF Pages dashboard to:

bash build.sh

Build output directory: _site

GitHub Pages:

Push to your repo — the included .github/workflows/pages.yml calls build.sh automatically.

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 - Manually generate thumbnails (only needed for local testing)

Thumbnail Generation

Thumbnails are automatically generated during your CI build (GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages) when you push your changes. The build sets JEKYLL_ENV=production, which triggers the SVG thumbnail generator and converts them to PNG using rsvg-convert (installed via librsvg2-bin on the CI runner).

No local ImageMagick, no separate command, no manual steps.

If you want to preview thumbnails locally, you can run:

JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build --config _config.yml,_config.thumbnails.yml

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

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