Simple

What is Simple?

Welcome to Simple, a GitHub Pages template for artists based on the Minimal theme. This template is designed for artists to be able to set up their own website quickly and easily.

Features

Customize with your own logo, favicon, fonts, and colors without knowing any HTML or CSS
Single column and two column layout options
Tags and Archive pages to make your blog easy to browse and navigate
Preformatted Open Graph meta tags so your website looks professional when shared on social media
Optional robots.txt file to prevent your images being scraped by AI Image Generators
Automatically generated RSS feed
Icons for various social media websites including ko-fi, patreon, twitch, instagram, and mastodon

Permalink | Date: 12/16/22 | tags: #introduction

Getting Started with Simple

To start your own website using Simple

Fork the repository on GitHub

A screenshot showing where to find the 'fork' option. On the repository page, the 'fork' option appears on the top right next to the 'watch' and 'star' buttons. there is a drop down menu from 'fork, and the last option reads '+ Create a new fork' this is the option that you want.

Go to your repository Settings > Pages and under Build and Development set up your source and branch as shown and hit ‘save’.

A screenshot showing the settings described above. You will find the repository settings in the top menu of your repository, and the pages settings will be in the left hand menu of the settings page. Under 'Build and Development' you will set the source to 'Deploy from Branch' and the branch to 'main' 'root' then hit 'save'.

Upload your own logo and favicon to the assets/img/ folder (optional)
Edit the _config.yml file with your own fonts, colors, and socials. The template is set up to support google fonts, you can choose a background, font color, and two highlight colors. This is also where you will add your social media links.
Delete the existing posts and images and start posting!

Permalink | Date: 12/15/22 | tags: #introduction

Writing Your First Post

Setting up Your First Post

To write your first post on your new website, navigate to the /_posts/ folder from your repositories main directory. If you forked the repository you will see all of the posts that I wrote in your _posts folder, along with the file 2022-01-01-template.md. You can delete all of the files except for this template file, which you will use to quickly make new posts.

To delete files, you simply click on the file to view it, then hit the trash can in the top right corner.

A screenshot of the top right corner of each GitHub file. It shows a menu of icons, with the last icon, which is circled here in red, being a trash can.

Once you have deleted everything except for the template file, open the template file. In the same menu on the top right where you see the trash can, there is an icon that looks like two squares overlapping. This is the ‘copy’ icon. Click on it to copy the contents of the file.

A screenshot of the same menu, with the icon that looks like two squares overlapping circled in red.

Now return to your /_posts/ folder and create a new file.

A screenshot showing the dropdown menu 'Add file > create new file'

For now leave your file unnamed and paste the contents of the template file that you copied earlier.

For ease of editing, I always choose the ‘soft wrap’ option to allow the text to wrap.

A screenshot showing the drop down menu 'Line wrapmode > soft wrap'

Naming Your Post

You post files must contain the date in YYYY-MM-DD format, representing the date that the post was published, followed by a short titled with all spaces represented by a -.

Front Matter

The first part of every post will be the front matter. This is the information that appears between the sets of --- dashes.

---
layout: post
title: 
tags: ["TAG1", "TAG2", "TAG3"]
published: false
---

The layout will always be post.
The title is where you write the title of the post as you’d like it to appear on your website.
tags is where you can categorize the post. You can create whatever tags you want for your blog, and you can add as many or as few as you would like. Tags should be written as shown here, within brackets and with each tag in quotation marks.
published is followed by true or false and tells GitHub whether you want the post to appear live on your website or not. If you are drafting a post you may wish to keep it unpublished, or maybe you changed your mind about a post but don’t want to delete it completely.

Writing Your Post

The body of your post can be written in markdown or HTML, or a mix of the two.

If you are a visual artist, the most important markdown syntax will be how to insert an image. You can upload images into your /assets/img/ folder and point to them with the following markdown.

![Image Description](/assets/img/YOUR-IMAGE-NAME)

Permalink | Date: 12/13/22 | tags: #introduction

Additional Resources

Helpful resources to set up and modify your website

Permalink | Date: 12/12/22 | tags: #resources

Share how you use Simple

Are you using Simple for your blog or website? Do you have questions or issues with the template? I would love to hear from you. You can email me or you can find me on mastodon.

Permalink | Date: 12/05/22 | tags: #share

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