Point Zero

Point Zero is a truly minimal micro-blog theme for Jekyll.

Point Zero eschews many of the typical blogger “must-haves” in pursuit of an uncluttered and esoteric reading experience.

This means:

no social sharing or following options
~~no logo~~ logo option is now added to config.yml for structured data
no footer
no sitewide navigation
no link to homepage
no sidebars
no comments

Additionally, the theme is meant to be :

Simple to use
Free to use
Semantic Markup
Minimal use of Javascript and CSS
High lighthouse scores
High Web Vitals scores

So, what does it have?

Point Zero will display your latest post on the homepage. The only navigation element from there, and throughout the site, is a single arrow icon that will randomly advance you to another post.
Sub navigation can be provided by adding recommended content (posts) via dropdown menu in the post editor.
Clicking the site title will not bring you back to the home page, but will display your About information.
The layout is clean, simple, and responsive.

Using the theme:

This repository is a template.

While logged into your GitHub account simply click the green button “Use this template”
Give your repository a name and an optional description. (It’s not necessary to include all branches.)
In your newly created repository, open the _config.yml file in the root directory (not the one in the admin directory)
Edit the file to fill out the following fields:

title: This will display in the header and title meta tags.
email: Your email address, or address to the admin of the site.
description: A description of the site. Use best paractices.
baseurl: this is often left blank unless you are using a subdirectory of another site for the installation.
url: the base hostname & protocol for - your site, e.g. http://example.com.
author: the site author name. this can be you or the name of the site.
logo: the site logo. this won’t currently display on the site, but is needed for structured data.

From here you’ll want to follow these instructions to launch the site on Netlify’s free-tier:

Netlify CMS

Netlify CMS is built-in with the following configuration fields:

layout: provides no options and is hidden in the post editor.
title: provides the post title and a sanitized slug/permalink based on the title content. ❗❗❗ Use a descriptive title and then do not change it unless you also want the permalink to change ❗❗❗
date: automatically generated upon creation of post, but can be updated in the CMS.
image: required for Jekyll SEO plugin and structured data.
excerpt: required for Jekyll SEO plugin and structured data.
media (optional): media adds one or more full-width image or YouTube embed types to the top of the post. Recommended 1 per post.
post content (optional): features a mini pagebuilder to add blocks of written content, images, and YouTube embeds to the post. Recommended at least one instance of WYSIWYG block.

Authenticate on Netlify

With the configuration already set-up, you’ll just need to follow these steps to enable authentication on Netlify.

Once the CMS is set up, you can access it via {yoursite.com}/admin

You can add content to the about modal via the Site Settings -> Site Info field.

You can create new posts or edit existing posts via the Post post type.

Although the purpose of this theme is somewhat esoteric in its exclusion of blogger “must-haves”, you can work around the limitations by leveraging the WYSIWYG editor in the Post post type if you desire.

Plugins

Jekyll SEO Tag

A Jekyll plugin to add metadata tags for search engines and social networks to better index and display your site’s content.

Jekyll Sitemap

Jekyll plugin to silently generate a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap for your Jekyll site.

Jekyll Autoprefixer

This plugin provides simple autoprefixer support for Jekyll. To ensure compatibility with the latest version of Jekyll I’ve clamped the execjs gem to version 2.7.0, per this issue

Jekyll Picture Tag

The current configuration automatically builds resized images for most of your image library. I have not enabled .webp generation because the degradation in image sharpness is a little gross to look at. The settings can be found in _data/picture.yml if you’re feeling adventurous.

Another Sample Post

Post Content Section

Photo by Dids from Pexels

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Photo by Dids from Pexels. Full-width class applied in the post editor.

Post Content Section

Another post Content Section