Dashboard Theme is a Jekyll theme that turns your GitHub Pages site into something that feels less like a blog and more like a developer’s workspace. Every post lives inside a window-chrome card. A persistent sidebar keeps navigation within reach. Stat widgets on the home page give you a glanceable overview of your content.
Design Philosophy
Most Jekyll themes are websites that happen to be built with Jekyll. Dashboard Theme is a developer’s UI that happens to be a blog.
The design draws from:
- GitHub’s dark interface —
#0d1117backgrounds,#388bfdblue accents - VS Code / Electron apps — sidebar-left layout with section headers and active indicators
- macOS window chrome — traffic-light dots, title bars, window frames around content
Installing the Theme
Clone the repository and run Jekyll locally:
git clone https://github.com/csswitch/jekyll-dashboard-theme.git
cd jekyll-dashboard-theme
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve
Visit http://localhost:4000 — you’ll have the full Dashboard UI running locally.
Configuration
Open _config.yml and update the core settings:
title: "Your Site Name"
description: "Your site description"
url: "https://yourusername.github.io"
baseurl: ""
The dashboard: block controls theme-specific behavior:
dashboard:
os: "Your OS" # shown in taskbar
sidebar: true # toggle sidebar
widgets: true # home stat widgets
window_chrome: true # post window frames
taskbar: true # bottom bar
Writing Posts
Posts follow standard Jekyll conventions. Add front matter with layout: post:
---
layout: post
title: "My Post Title"
date: 2024-01-15
tags: [jekyll, tutorial]
---
Your content here.
Tags automatically appear in both the Tags page cloud and the post header. The sidebar recent-posts panel updates to show your 5 most recent entries.
What’s Next
Explore the Archive page (/archive/) for a year-grouped view of all posts, or head to Tags (/tags/) for the full tag cloud. The About page is ready to customize with your own bio and links.