Introducing Celeste

Celeste is a lightweight Jekyll theme that features a minimalist, content-first design. It places your content center stage and lets your readers view them in a clutter-free environment without visual distractions. It is based on Poole, the Jekyll butler, by @mdo.

Built on Poole

Poole is the Jekyll Butler, serving as an upstanding and effective foundation for Jekyll themes by @mdo. Poole, and all its derivatives (like Celeste) includes the following:

  • Complete Jekyll setup included (layouts, config, 404, RSS feed, posts, and a sample 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
  • Syntax highlighting, courtesy of rouge

Celeste Features

In addition to the features of Poole, Celeste adds the following:

  • A design and structure with customizability in mind
  • A clean, unobstrusive top navigation bar
  • A landing page template for showcasing the most important content on your website
  • Optimized for compatibility with most reading tools such as Pocket, Instapaper and Feedly.
  • Subtle animations on UI elements that give visual feedback when interacting with the page
  • Over 500 scalable vector icons, courtesy of Font Awesome

Check out the README for more details.

Browser support

Celeste is by preference a forward-thinking project. It is best viewed on the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

Download

Celeste is developed on and hosted with GitHub. Head to the GitHub repository for downloads, bug reports, and features requests.

Example content

Howdy! This is an example blog post that shows several types of HTML content supported in this theme.

Inline HTML elements

HTML defines a long list of available inline tags, a complete list of which can be found on the Mozilla Developer Network.

  • To bold text, use <strong>.
  • To italicize text, use <em>.
  • Abbreviations, like HTML should use <abbr>, with an optional title attribute for the full phrase.
  • Citations, like — Mark otto, should use <cite>.
  • Deleted text should use <del> and inserted text should use <ins>.
  • Superscript text uses <sup> and subscript text uses <sub>.

Most of these elements are styled by browsers with few modifications on our part.

Truncated Post Previews

Celeste also supports truncated post previews that are customizable on a per-post basis. This is a sample of how a truncated post looks like. Click on Read more to see the rest of the post!

Read more

What's Jekyll?

Jekyll is a static site generator, an open-source tool for creating simple yet powerful websites of all shapes and sizes. From the project’s readme:

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory […] and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.

It’s an immensely useful tool. Find out more by visiting the project on GitHub.