My primary goal in this Jekyll project is to use existing tools instead of creating my own. In other words, I very much don’t want to construct the look and feel of my site. Others have generously done that for me (and the rest of the world) by sharing themes.

The obvious choice of theme is Minima. Without knowing anything about why it’s so great, GitHub Pages chose it for their default so it has to be pretty good. I don’t feel particularly drawn to it, though.

I have never been very good at making things easy for myself, opting instead for a challenge, so I feel I can allow myself to choose a different theme here. I like the look of Time Machine more so I’m going with it.

Right away I came up with some ideas for customization:

• The banner with download buttons will be repurposed as a navigation bar
• Relativize the dimensions to work on a wider range of screens
• Remove the curent section floating box and make the navigator bar sticky

Customization comes with a great cost, at least for my intended purpose: modifying the theme means I am separating it from the theme creators. I am copying the theme into my local version so I can customize it. This is in direct opposition to the point of this Jekyll project, which is to utilize existing tools without rewriting them myself.

But I’ll still do it because I learn best by writing the code myself. I still have enough to learn about what themes are that it’s ok to do it whatever way works. And I’ll be sure to try and keep my customizations to a minimum. I want to keep the option available to undo my theme customizations and revert to the externally imported theme process in the future, once I have a better idea of what role the theme plays and how I can achieve my goals without modifying it.