Over the last few months I’ve been working on an open source Jekyll theme called Hitchens. Inspired by the design of Christopher Hitchens’ book, Arguably, Hitchens was designed to emphasize the power of the written word.

There are two key reasons why I wanted to create this theme:

1. I’ve been using Jekyll to publish my personal site for 3 years and have fallen in love with the platform. Learning the Liquid template language helped me design and develop a new Shopify site for Rye 51 in just 4 weeks and I’ve built several other sites for clients with Jekyll since.

2. I’ve been working as a professional designer and developer for over 10 years. Almost everything I know about design was learned from the incredible people who have shared their knowledge and work freely online. Every project I’ve ever worked on has benefited in some way from the open source community.

   Hitchens is a small but important token of my appreciation to those who have given their time, energy, and knowledge to the open source community. Small because it’s a simple Jekyll theme. Important because it’s my first major contribution to the open source community since 2008.

Hitchens is released under an MIT license, the contents of which can be found in the theme’s repository on Github. This is the same license used for Minima, the default theme for Jekyll. Additional licensing information can be found on the project’s Github repository page.

Some cool features make Hitchens pretty special:

1. The theme supports title-less posts out of the box. This means you can use this theme for both long-form writing and microblogging.
2. Built-in JSON Feed support.
3. A custom DuckDuckGo-powered search form.
4. A skip-navigation link — even Minima doesn’t have one :D

I would be honoured if you would check out the theme and overjoyed if you would consider using it for your own Jekyll-powered blog. And if you notice any issues at all, don’t hesitate to let me know.

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