How to render background image in a page generated by Jekyll? - html

Question

As a novice starting out on GitHub Pages, I am lost among the sea of materials on the web that seem to help with my following problem:
I am using Jekyll to build my blog hosted via GitHub Pages and would like to add a background image in my default homepage like this.
So, how do I do it? I have started out, but have little to no knowledge of HTML / CSS and would thus be grateful for a simple way to do the same.
I am currently using the default minima theme! :)

Answer 1

Minima doesn't have a provision to easily render a "cover photo" like you expect to. But that doesn't mean, it is impossible to render one.
When using Minima, your homepage is rendered via the file ./index.md and layout file _layouts/home.html. So, if your working directory doesn't contain the home layout, create the _layouts directory with a file named home.html.
The home layout in Minima
I'll explain what the layout contains so that you'll be able to use that knowledge in other areas.
The layout contains the following code. Copy the entire code below into the _layouts/home.html file you just created in the above step:
---
layout: default
---
<div class="home">
{%- if page.title -%}
<h1 class="page-heading">{{ page.title }}</h1>
{%- endif -%}
{{ content }}
{%- if site.posts.size > 0 -%}
<h2 class="post-list-heading">{{ page.list_title | default: "Posts" }}</h2>
<ul class="post-list">
{%- for post in site.posts -%}
<li>
{%- assign date_format = site.minima.date_format | default: "%b %-d, %Y" -%}
<span class="post-meta">{{ post.date | date: date_format }}</span>
<h3>
<a class="post-link" href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">
{{ post.title | escape }}
</a>
</h3>
{%- if site.show_excerpts -%}
{{ post.excerpt }}
{%- endif -%}
</li>
{%- endfor -%}
</ul>
<p class="rss-subscribe">subscribe via RSS</p>
{%- endif -%}
</div>
Let's dissect the layout chunk by chunk:
---
layout: default
---
This is a front matter block that tells Jekyll the 'home' layout is a subset of the 'default' layout.
<div class="home">
This opens up a container for everything else on the home page and is closed by the </div> on the very last line.
{%- if page.title -%}
<h1 class="page-heading">{{ page.title }}</h1>
{%- endif -%}
This a template instruction that would render the home page's title if it was provided in the front matter inside file ./index.md.
{{ content }}
This is another template instruction that pulls in content (anything apart fron the front matter) from the file using this layout. In our case, that would be ./index.md.
The remaining chunk {%- if site.posts.size > 0 -%} cycles through the posts in your site and renders a list of those posts.
The cover image
We now have a fair idea regarding what our template is made of. But there is no mention of the code to render the cover-photo.
Agreed. So, let us code that in then. Insert the code from the following steps before the line with {{ content }} in the layout
First, add a container for the image.
<div class="hero">
</div>
Then insert the HTML markup to render the image of your choice (say, ./assets/home-feature.jpg) within it:
<div class="hero">
<img class="feature-img" src="{{ 'assets/home-feature.jpg' | relative_url }}" />
</div>
With just the above markup, your image would perhaps be too big for your page. So we should constrain the size with some CSS styling.
Minima uses Sass partials to generate the CSS for your site. Therefore, we'll need to overwrite a partial with some custom code.
Create a new directory named _sass with a subdirectory named minima and finally a file inside the _sass/minima directory named _layout.scss. Copy the contents at this link into that file.
Now add the following custom code towards the end of the file:
/* Cover Image */
.hero {
.feature-img: {
max-width: 100%;
}
}
Rendering background image
All of the above is to just render a cover-photo. To render the image as a proper background-image, you can do the following..
First, we need to adjust the markup to render text in the foreground and image only as the background:
<div class="hero">
{{ page.hero_text }}
</div>
With the above in place you are now able to control the text over your background-image via front matter in ./index.md.
And then bring back the image using CSS:
/* Cover Image */
.hero {
background: url('../home-feature.jpg');
}
Getting the url to your image is a little tricky since we can't use Liquid instructions inside sass partials in vanilla Jekyll. So you'll have to experiment with it for your particular site.
For more tips regarding CSS backgrounds, check this link

Answer 2

Have you look into the inspector tool? Another easy way is to look at the code snippet of that website which you can find here: https://github.com/mnp-club/mnp-club.github.io
I'm pulling up the exact code for what they do to achieve that effect this will :
https://github.com/mnp-club/mnp-club.github.io/blob/master/_layouts/page.html
<div id="main" role="main">
<article class="entry">
{% if page.image.feature %}<img src="{{ site.url }}/images/{{ page.image.feature }}" class="entry-feature-image" alt="{{ page.title }}"{% endif %}
// Alternatively a simpler way will be to just include the img src code.
// <img src="insert-image-url.jpg" class="entry-feature-image"/>
// Whole bunch of code for body here
</article>
</div>
And to make it a full-width header image, just give it a css of
.entry-feature-image {
width: 100%;
}
My blog run on jekyll minima and github pages as well and I have a default header for certain pages. Making it full width is just a matter of CSS.
https://github.com/wing-puah/thegeekwing-jekyll/blob/master/_layouts/default.html
What you can do is just add the html code for the image to the _layouts/default.html file.
There are different ways to achieve what you want. Understand that you have little experience with html and css but I will suggest to pull up the inspector tools and see the code to identify which code does what. Hope that helps!