Whiteglass Jekyll Theme
Minimal, responsive Jekyll theme for hackers. Clean white design with category and tag archives, paginated post listing, and i18n support.
About this Theme
Whiteglass is a stripped-back Jekyll blog theme designed for developers and writers who want their words front and centre. There is no sidebar, no hero image, and no visual noise — just a clean white canvas, sensible typography, and a post list that gets out of the way.
The theme takes its name from its defining aesthetic: a near-white surface with barely-there borders and minimal colour. The only accent colour is the soft blue used on links and the “read more” text, keeping the reading experience calm and distraction-free.
Who It’s For
Whiteglass is built for developers who care about clean code and writing. It’s particularly well-suited to technical bloggers, hacker-culture writers, and anyone who wants a no-fuss blog that loads fast and looks sharp without extensive customisation.
If you’ve used Jekyll’s default Minima theme and found it slightly too opinionated, Whiteglass is a natural step up — it offers category archives, tag archives, and pagination out of the box, all without adding visual clutter.
Key Features
Category and Tag Archives — Whiteglass uses jekyll-archives to generate dedicated archive pages for every category and tag automatically. Each post can belong to multiple categories and carry multiple tags, and Whiteglass links them throughout the post listing and individual posts.
Paginated Post Listing — The home page lists posts five at a time (configurable) with clean pagination controls. Long-running blogs with hundreds of posts stay navigable without any additional setup.
i18n Support — Date formats, labels like “read more”, and other fixed strings are localised through _data/i18n.yml. The theme ships with English by default, but adding your language is a matter of editing one YAML file. Individual posts can declare a different lang in their front matter, which updates the <html lang=""> attribute for that page.
External URL Posts — A little-known feature: set external-url in a post’s front matter and the post title becomes a link to that external URL. Ideal for link-blog style posting where you want to reference articles and add commentary.
Comment Support — Whiteglass provides a clean integration point for Disqus or Isso via an _includes/custom_comments_provider.html override. Enable comments site-wide with comments: true in _config.yml, or disable on individual posts.
SEO and Social Meta — The theme outputs full Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags. Twitter card type, image, and creator are all configurable per post. Facebook og:image and fb:admins are supported too.
RSS Feed — Drop a feed.xml with layout: feed into your site root and Whiteglass generates a full-content RSS feed. You can also point it at a custom path like atom.xml via config.
Installation
Whiteglass requires a few gems that GitHub Pages does not support natively (jekyll-archives in particular), so you’ll need to deploy through GitHub Actions, Netlify, or another build pipeline rather than GitHub Pages’ built-in Jekyll build.
The quickest way to get started is with the official whiteglass-template — fork it, fill in your _config.yml, and you’re running.
For a manual setup, add gem "jekyll-whiteglass" to your Gemfile, set theme: jekyll-whiteglass in _config.yml, and copy across the starter files (index.html, about.md, archives.md, feed.xml, and the _data directory).
Customisation
Whiteglass follows Jekyll’s standard override pattern — copy any file from the gem into your site directory and edit it. The CSS lives in assets/main.scss and imports whiteglass, so you can add custom styles after the import without touching the gem source.
Navigation links are defined in _data/navigation.yml, making it easy to add or remove header links without editing any HTML. The footer is similarly customisable via _includes/footer_content.html.
Performance and Accessibility
Whiteglass ships with zero JavaScript by default. There are no carousels, no modal overlays, and no third-party scripts unless you opt in to Google Analytics or a comment system. Pages are plain HTML and minimal CSS, which translates to fast load times even on slow connections.
The theme is accessibility-conscious — it uses semantic HTML5 elements, proper heading hierarchy, and clear link text throughout. The pa11y CI configuration in the repository shows accessibility testing is part of the development workflow.
Maintenance Status
The repository has been actively maintained since 2016, with 32 releases as of late 2024. The latest release (v1.11.7, October 2024) keeps the theme compatible with current Jekyll versions. With 783 GitHub stars and 196 forks, it has a solid community of users and contributors.
For a simple, elegant, writer-focused Jekyll blog that stays out of your way, Whiteglass delivers exactly what it promises.
Features
- Ultra-minimal white layout focused on readability
- Category and tag archive pages
- Paginated post listing
- i18n (internationalisation) support via _data/i18n.yml
- RSS feed with jekyll-feed
- External URL support — link post titles to external sources
- Disqus or Isso comment integration
- Google Analytics (UA and GA4) support
- SEO meta tags and Open Graph support
- Customisable navigation via _data/navigation.yml
- MIT licensed, actively maintained
