I’ve created three new projects for Jekyll: Watery, Purelog, and Enjoyment Work. Watery is a minimalist theme that uses the Water.css framework and has received a perfect score of 100/100 in performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO according to Google Lighthouse. Purelog is a sidebar theme that uses the Pure.css framework and is designed for those looking for a unique theme with features such as customizable collections, archive pages, and author bio. Finally, Enjoyment Work is a project that highlights the messy and non-linear nature of thinking. All three projects are free and open-source.

Watery, Purelog, and Enjoyment Work: Free and Open-Source!

1) Watery

Source Code: **https://github.com/brennanbrown/watery**
Demonstration Site: **https://watery.netlify.app**

After my last post on Jekyll, I decided I wanted to contribute something myself to the community! So, without further ado, here is my announcement of the Watery theme!

Watery is a minimalist, bare-bones theme for the popular JAMstack file-based CMS Jekyll that only uses the <80kb Water.css framework (hence the name!), while still following the best practices possible for accessibility and search-engine optimization.

I created this because I wasn’t able to find an up-to-date starter/skeleton theme for Jekyll. Even the default theme, Minima, uses the large Bootstrap framework.

What’s the big deal, you might ask? As of November 1st, 2020, with >70 posts on Watery, the website scores a perfect 100/100 in Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO on an audit with **Google Lighthouse**.

With so many tools available for web devs, it’s easy to create something beautiful, but increasingly it becomes difficult to build something that’s lean and efficient, losing sight of the computer science behind everything.

This project is aimed towards those curious about using Jekyll for the first time, and want to build from as close to scratch as possible. Alternatively, it still has all the features required for creating a hassle-free, informational website or blog in just a few clicks.

2) Purelog

Source Code: **https://github.com/brennanbrown/purelog**
Demonstration Site: **https://purelog.netlify.app**

Purelog is a responsive, sidebar theme for the popular JAMstack generator Jekyll that only uses the minimal Pure.css framework (hence the name, also!), while still following the best practices possible for accessibility and search-engine optimization.

I created this after finishing Watery, as a way to add more functionality and design while still remaining as lightweight as possible.

This project is aimed towards those looking for an interesting theme for Jekyll that has features that aren’t found commonly elsewhere, specifically having separate sections dedicated towards: blogging, note-taking, and daily journal entries.

Features:

• A fully customizable and empty _BLANK_config.yml to make getting up-and-running easy.

• A speedy, on-site search function using Simply Jekyll Search.

• Custom collections for different types of material (note-taking, journal writing, etc.)

• An auto-generating archive page that displays all entries from all collections.

• Auto-generating tags and categories pages.

• Having a _pages collection for easier organization.

• An author bio at the end of each post. (Located in _inclues/author.html)

• Full Rouge support for syntax highlighting. (Currently using base16.solarized.light)

• Auto-generated RSS feed, sitemap, accessibility features, and search-engine optimization.

3) Enjoyment work

Source Code: **https://github.com/brennanbrown/enjoyment-work**
Demonstration Site: **https://enjoyment-work.netlify.app**

Linear thinking is a myth. Not only is it non-linear, it’s messy. Thinking involves a lot of back and forth, dead ends, branching, walking back, merging ideas, changing ideas, contradicting ideas.

This is exactly why I’ve been working on my 3rd open-source project: Enjoyment Work! Unlike my previous two projects, this goes further than blogging:

It’s designed to be a useful tool for academia, researching and beyond, providing extensive features for note-taking and personal growth. It is based off of the “Digital Garden” philosophy, which you can read more about on the demo site.

Why use Jekyll for this? A very cool feature of static site generators is that they only require plain-text Markdown files to generate gorgeous-looking information on websites.

Another up-and-coming app that does the same thing, though with a completely different paradigm, is **Obsidian**, allowing you to use the two in addendum — a killer feature.

Unlike other tools, all your information is kept solely by you, and is completely agnostic to work with other products. And of course, it’s free and open-source!

About B. Kenneth Brown