linky

A linktree-esque theme, built for static hosting and easy maintenance with Decap CMS.

To create a new repo and a linked Netlify site, ready to configure:

To use this theme with an existing (probably bare) Jekyll site, add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-theme-linky"

And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml (or replace any other theme configuration):

theme: jekyll-theme-linky

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install jekyll-theme-linky

Use the links layout on any page (including the home page) to display a list of all items in the links collection. Any additional content within your page will be displayed after the list.

The links collection is defined by individual files in the _links folder. Only the YAML frontmatter of these files will be used; content is unnecessary and will be ignored.

You will need to add a links collection to your Jekyll config, which is as simple as adding

collections:
    - links

to your _config.yml (see this repo's config for an example).

In addition to your site's title (always displayed at the top of the links page), you can define one or more "subhead" lines to display just below the title.

These are defined as a subheads list in _config.yml:

subheads:
    - "A Linktree-esque Jekyll theme, compatible with Decap CMS."
    - "Probably more I could say here."

You can override the color scheme of a Links page by adding a linky section to your _config.yml (see the example in this repo) and setting one or more of these values:

linky:
    body_background: "#fa0616"
    body_foreground: "#f0f0f0"
    button_foreground: "#f16293"
    button_background: "#f16293"
    social_button_color: "#ffffff"

These alter the page's background and foreground, and the background and foreground of each link "button".

A link item is defined using the following fields:

---
link: "https://example.com/"
image: "/images/example.jpg"
title: 'My link test'
priority: 5
expires: 2024-11-11
---

• link

  This is the target of our link. Both the image and text will point to this address. It can be a full URL or a relative URL to another page on your site.

• image

  The URL of an image to prefix the link. This should be an image on your site, to be safe -- but you can reference an external image. Note that the image will be displayed at a small size (3.5em in the default styles) and cropped to a circular shape.

• title

  The text to display in our link entry. Shorter text will look cleaner, but there's no arbitrary limit.

• priority

  Links are sorted by numerical priority (i.e. 1 comes first), then by title.

• expires

  A date after which this link should no longer be displayed.

  Note that this will only take effect on a rebuild; there's no runtime JavaScript, etc. to disable a link that's already been deployed.

The whole point of this exercise (as opposed to adding links by hand or using a database-backed site) was to add/update links via a CMS, but still serve static HTML for the usual speed and safety reasons.

In my case, I'm using Decap CMS and Netlify. The Decap view for linky.roub.net looks like this:

Clicking on one of those links takes me to the detail page:

See the admin folder for the relevant configuration, as well as the JS that allows for a custom preview styles (which just uses the site's CSS).

Most of the admin's config.yml will be the same regardless of your Decap setup, but some of the integration details (authorization, etc.) will differ if you're not using the same setup that I am. See the Decap docs for information on the drop-in setup I'm using.

Copy the admin/index.html file from this repo into your Decap admin directory if you're using the matching Netlify setup. If not, make sure you add the script tag to enable our custom preview (it will work without the tag, but it will be ugly):

<script src="/assets/preview.js"></script>

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/paulroub/linky. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.