Introducing BlackDoc

14 May 2015

BlackDoc is a two-column Jekyll theme that’s ideal for websites that require a master-detail layout for viewing of content. It’s based on Poole, the Jekyll butler, and the Hyde theme.

I needed a two-column layout with a scrolling sidebar to publish my code cheatsheets, and found the Hyde Jekyll theme to be a good starting theme. To complement the color scheme of my main website, I customised the theme to make it look great in black background and changed the sidebar to display scrolling content. I created this theme because I can’t seem to find any good Jekyll theme with a master-detail layout. Hopefully, someone will find this useful as well in their own projects.

Built on Poole

Poole is the Jekyll Butler, serving as a foundation for creating Jekyll themes. Poole-based themes, such as BlackDoc here, include the following:

• Complete Jekyll setup included (layouts, config, 404, RSS feed, posts, and example page)
• Mobile friendly design and development
• Easily scalable text and component sizing with rem units in the CSS
• Support for a wide gamut of HTML elements
• Related posts (time-based, because Jekyll) below each post
• Syntax highlighting using Pygments (the Python-based code snippet highlighter)

BlackDoc Features

In addition to the features of Poole and Hyde, BlackDoc theme adds the following:

• Scrolling sidebar with a thin scrollbar to allow displaying of numerous top-level content.
• Elements and classes of the Hyde theme were updated to look great in black background. Check out the Theme Styles to see the stylings used in the theme.

Check out the Readme of Poole and Hyde theme to learn more about the features.

Browser support

BlackDoc theme supports most modern browsers and only compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and above.

Download

BlackDoc is a free Jekyll theme and hosted with GitHub. Head to the GitHub repository to download.

Cheers!