Simple Texture

Simple Texture is a responsive, gem-based Jekyll theme with a textured background aesthetic, created for Jekyll 3.3 and above and also distributable as a fork for older versions.

What is Simple Texture?

Simple Texture is a Jekyll theme developed by Yi Zeng, available as a Ruby gem or as a GitHub repository that can be forked. It takes standard Jekyll content—posts, pages, and configuration—and renders a responsive blog or personal website with a subtle noise-texture background. The theme includes a starter-kit folder containing the essential files to get a new site running quickly.

Key Features

• Gem-based installation — Install via jekyll-theme-simple-texture gem for Jekyll 3.3 or above, or fork the repository to use with older Jekyll versions.
• Responsive design — The layout adapts to desktop, tablet, and mobile screens.
• Preconfigured Jekyll plugins — Includes jekyll-feed, jekyll-redirect-from, jekyll-seo-tag, jekyll-sitemap, and Simple-Jekyll-Search for search functionality.
• Sass styling — Built with Sass, incorporating Normalize.css, Animate.css, Simple Icons, and a noise texture generator.
• JavaScript enhancements — Uses jQuery, fullPage.js, pace.js, Modernizr, FancyBox, and unveil.js (for lazy image loading).
• Custom typography — Bundles the Bitter, Junge, and Ubuntu Condensed fonts from Google Fonts.
• Demo sites — Includes a starter-kit demo at https://yizeng.github.io/jekyll-theme-simple-texture/ and the author's personal blog at https://yizeng.me/blog.

Who is it for?

• Bloggers — Publish a personal blog with a clean, textured design and built-in SEO, sitemap, and search.
• Jekyll developers — Use the theme as a gem for new projects, or fork the repository and customize the Sass and layouts.
• GitHub Pages users — Fork the repo and switch the Gemfile to the github-pages gem to host the site on GitHub Pages.

What can you do with Simple Texture?

• Launch a blog quickly — Copy the starter-kit folder into a new Jekyll app, run bundle install, and serve locally.
• Customize the texture — Modify the Sass variables and the noise texture generator settings to change the background style.
• Add search and SEO — The included Simple-Jekyll-Search, jekyll-seo-tag, and jekyll-sitemap plugins work out of the box.
• Deploy to GitHub Pages — Fork the repository, remove the gem-specific files, and use the github-pages gem in the Gemfile.

How does Simple Texture work?

For a new site, install Jekyll and Bundler, run jekyll new, and replace the default files with those from the starter-kit folder. Then run bundle install and bundle exec jekyll serve. For an existing Jekyll app, remove default pages, download the starter-kit, copy it to the root, and serve.

FAQ

Is Simple Texture free?

Yes, Simple Texture is open source under the MIT License. You can use, modify, and redistribute the theme freely, with attribution to the copyright holder Yi Zeng.

What Jekyll versions are supported?

The gem-based installation requires Jekyll 3.3 or above. For older Jekyll versions, you can fork the repository and use it as a boilerplate instead.

Can I use Simple Texture with GitHub Pages?

Yes, by forking the repository and updating the Gemfile to use the github-pages gem instead of the standalone gems. The README provides explicit steps for this workflow.

Does Simple Texture include search functionality?

Yes, Simple-Jekyll-Search is included in the theme's dependencies, providing client-side search for posts and pages.