Project: grantbenjamin.github.io

Personal academic website for Grant Benjamin, hosted on GitHub Pages. Built on Jekyll with the Minimal Mistakes theme loaded as a remote_theme (mmistakes/minimal-mistakes in _config.yml).

Critical implication of remote_theme

Layouts (default, single, home, archive, etc.) and most _includes/*.html are NOT in this repo — they are fetched from the gem at build time. Only files explicitly overridden locally exist here. To inspect a layout or include the user references but you can’t find, fetch it from the upstream theme:

• Layouts: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/master/_layouts/<name>.html
• Includes: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/master/_includes/<name>.html

Use curl (not WebFetch — it summarizes instead of returning raw HTML).

Where things live

• _config.yml — site title, URL, social handles, theme, skin (minimal_mistakes_skin: custom), markdown engine.
• _data/navigation.yml — top nav menu items (Home, Research, Vita).
• _pages/ — non-post content: home.md, research.md, 404.md, archive pages. Front matter header.image sets the hero image (e.g. /assets/images/yukon4.jpeg).
• _posts/ — blog posts (mostly theme demo content from 2010 / a 2019 welcome post).
• _includes/head.html — local override of theme head.html (loads main.css, FontAwesome, academicons).
• _sass/minimal-mistakes.scss — partial-import manifest (mirrors upstream).
• _sass/minimal-mistakes/ — full local copy of theme SCSS partials (_masthead.scss, _navigation.scss, _page.scss, _variables.scss, _base.scss, _reset.scss, etc.) and skins/_custom.scss (the active skin).
• assets/css/main.scss — Jekyll entry SCSS; imports the active skin then minimal-mistakes.
• assets/images/ — photos and hero images (yukon4.jpeg is the home hero).
• documents/ — CV PDF served at /documents/GrantBenjaminPhDCV.pdf.

Where to edit common things

• Header bar / nav styling → _sass/minimal-mistakes/_masthead.scss and _sass/minimal-mistakes/_navigation.scss (.greedy-nav).
• Header text size → font-size on .masthead__inner-wrap (cascades to nav links and .site-title).
• Header bar height → padding on .masthead__inner-wrap + min-height on .greedy-nav (default $nav-height: 2em in _variables.scss).
• Space below header → .masthead { border-bottom, margin-bottom } and .page__hero { margin-top } in _page.scss.
• Hero image behavior → .page__hero / .page__hero-image in _sass/minimal-mistakes/_page.scss.
• Colors / skin → _sass/minimal-mistakes/skins/_custom.scss.
• Typography scale → $type-size-* and $h-size-* in _sass/minimal-mistakes/_variables.scss. Body font is 1em and html scales 16→22px across breakpoints (_reset.scss).
• Nav menu items → _data/navigation.yml.
• Home page copy → _pages/home.md.

Conventions

• Variables in _variables.scss use !default, so they can be overridden by defining them earlier (e.g. before the @import "minimal-mistakes" in assets/css/main.scss).
• Don’t edit theme partials at the gem — edit the local copies in _sass/minimal-mistakes/. They take precedence.
• The site is published from master to GitHub Pages; pushing to master is the deploy.