community website Jekyll themes
a project listing candidate community website Jekyll themes
Introduction
This page lists candidate Jekyll themes for building & maintaining the anticipated public website of the nascent Neuro-Symbolic Systems AI research community that is emerging within the Computer Science department at City, University of London. The anticipated website would become the public face of the City-rooted but, ultimately, global research community and be used to structure, communicate and promote its activities.
It also lists some Jekyll themes I’ve become aware of for building personal websites used by academics.
Candidate community website themes
This section lists some Jekyll themes I’ve come across that appear to be candidates for a website for the Neuro-Symbolic Systems research community.
Petridish
Claim: A Jekyll theme for research project websites. Mobile-friendly.
al-folio
As mentioned below, in the section on Personal website Jekyll themes, the al-folio theme was originally conceived for personal websites for academics. It’s the theme used by the site you’re currently visiting! But as I get to know this theme better, it’s becoming clear that it’s also feature-rich enough and flexible enough to support websites for academically-oriented groups. Hence, I now regard it as a strong candidate Jekyll theme for the Neuro-Symbolic Systems group.
Evidence for this opinion can be found in the User community section of the README.md page of the al-folio repo. There is a table there where people/groups who have used the theme and have come to admire it provide links to their sites. You’ll see that the al-folio theme has been used by several academic Lab Groups, several academic course modules at CMU (Carnegie Mellon Univ), and by several AI conferences & workshops (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, …). Visiting and browsing a sample of these sites gives one a sense of the features and flexibility of the theme and helps build confidence that it will be a safe investment for the Neuro-Symbolic Systems group.
Another source of confidence in the al-folio Jekyll theme is the number of times this repo has been forked: over 6,400! Not bad.
Yet another source of confidence is how active is its community. Loads of people submit Issues (for the occasional bug but also for feature requests); loads of people contribute by submitting Pull Requests; the Discussions page is full and current; and my fork of the repo was already 8 commits behind the main repo after about 1 week.
A further reason for having confidence in this theme is that, although it does not advertise the fact, the sites it produces are indeed mobile-friendly! Check some of the User community sites (or the one you’re visiting) on your phone and see.
Personal website themes
This section lists some Jekyll themes I’ve come across that appear to be oriented towards or appropriate to academics.
al-folio
Claim: A beautiful, simple, clean, and responsive Jekyll theme for academics.
This is the Jekyll theme that powers the GitHub Pages site you are currently visiting!
jackal
Claim: A very lightweight & responsive theme for Jekyll
I’ve seen this theme used to good effect by PhD students.