Migrating to Minimal Mistakes

Minimal mistakes is a great Jekyll theme. Perfect for building personal sites, blogs, and portfolios.

I started this blog last year. I posted a few items, but was never really engaged with the process. One aspect was the original style and colour-scheme. I never really liked it.

There is nothing wrong with the Hyde theme and Poole it was built on. It’s a good theme - clean and simple. However, my burnt orange colour scheme was too garish and displeased me.

I found Minimal Mistakes searching for a free theme. I had tried a few - for example Mediumish - even reverting back to Minima which is used as the default theme used by jekyll new.

Minimal Mistakes is the most popular free theme at https://jekyllthemes.io/free and for good reason. It has comprehensive documentation, a starter project and lots of features.

Migrating was relatively simple:

1. Downloaded the Minimal Mistakes Starter.
2. Expanded the starter into my project (I did not clone the template as I already had a repository - instead kept duplicate files for now).
3. Removed existing theme’s _includes and _layouts files.
4. Moved and updated core pages (404 and about).
5. Merged index.html files.
6. Moved images to new location under assets.
7. Merged _config.yml and Gemfile configurations.
8. Updated the front matter and image references in each post for the theme.

Hopefully you like it!