Swimmer is an opinionated yet invitingly simple Jekyll theme that extends and builds off of Poole, the foundational Jekyll setup by @mdo. The name comes from "David's Poole" → David Schwimmer → Swimmer.
Poole provides a clear and concise foundation for any Jekyll site. Swimmer takes that foundation and adds a dedicated landing page, mobile sidebar, dual-mechanism dark mode, self-hosted variable fonts, and Tailwind CSS v4 styling.
See it live at swimmer.dsillman.com.
- Dedicated landing page —
index.mdserves as a standalone homepage with logo, not a paginated post listing - Minimalist masthead — just site title, tagline, and dark mode toggle; no navigation bar
- Post sidebar — hamburger-triggered overlay on mobile, fixed-position list on desktop (≥75rem), showing the 10 most recent posts and any related posts
- Dark mode — respects
prefers-color-scheme, offers a manual toggle (sun/moon icons), persists preference inlocalStorage, and prevents flash of wrong theme - Self-hosted variable fonts — Inter (body) and Roboto Mono (code), preloaded as WOFF2
- Tailwind CSS v4 — modular CSS via
@tailwindcss/cli, compiled to a single minifiedstyles.css - Syntax highlighting — Rouge with separate light and dark color schemes
- Archive page — posts grouped by month/year
- Atom/RSS feed — built-in
atom.xml - SEO —
jekyll-seo-tagintegrated in<head>
$ make installThis runs bundle install and npm install. You'll need Ruby 3.3.0, Bundler, and Node (managed via fnm).
$ make serveOpen http://localhost:4000 in your browser. The CSS will rebuild on changes automatically.
$ make buildOutput goes to _site/.
Push your repo to GitHub and use GitHub Pages to host. Verify the baseurl option in _config.yml and CNAME if using a custom domain.
CSS lives in _css/ as modular files compiled into styles.css. Edit the source files in _css/, then run make css (or use make serve for auto-rebuild).
To regenerate screenshots:
$ make screenshotsSwimmer extends and builds off of Poole, the foundational Jekyll setup by @mdo. The original Poole project also produced the Hyde and Lanyon themes.
David Sillman — dsillman.com · GitHub
Originally built as Poole by Mark Otto (@mdo).
Open sourced under the MIT license.