Service release 8.5 includes a number of obvious improvements made possible by changes in the way the web works.

Hydejack was designed with personal sites in mind, i.e. sites with around 100 pages. Because of this, build speed hasn’t been a major concern during its development. When attempting to use Hydejack with thousands of pages this becomes very apparent, as build times go from seconds, to minutes, to hours.

Like many people, I’m a sucker for is dark UI themes, whether it’s Twitter, macOS, or code editors. I even built an addon for Atom that automatically switches between light and dark based on sunset and sunrise.

After a long wait, Hydejack 8 finally sees the day of its release. It makes Hydejack look more elegant (no more super bold headings) and introduces features that make your site more impressive to first time visitors, while loading faster for repeat visitors.

Hydejack offers a few additional features to markup your markdown. Don’t worry, these are merely CSS classes added with kramdown’s {:...} syntax, so that your content remains compatible with other Jekyll themes.

There should be whitespace between paragraphs. We recommend including a README, or a file with information about your project.

While v7 brings an insane amount of new stuff, the most notable change is the new background image. It is no longer anti-selling the theme. The old image was a blurred version of Napoleon Bonaparte, which was just… weird. I could tell the story of how this came to be, but I’d rather show you the new and improved background image.

This maintenance release includes various quality-of-life improvements, especially when using the gem-based version of the theme. These changes come in handy when using Hydejack for a quick (project-) page: The home layout, which is used when using jekyll new, is now a proper layout that displays a few posts/pages below the regular content, and it is again possible to define an author in _config.yml without setting up a _data directory (for more, see blow).

In this release I’ve added a “Other Projects” section to the bottom of each project page, making it easier for users to navigate through your collection and discover other projects. Also, it’s now possible to display larger (data-) tables that were previously cut off (especially on mobile devices).

This release makes including third party plugins easier. Until now, the push state approach to loading new pages has been interfering with embedded script tags. This version changes this by simulating the sequential loading of script tags on a fresh page load.