~chrono/archive/
How to highlight the current section of a Jekyll website

This is a quick blog and tutorial showing how to do a little simple thing to make my navigations bar a little better looking.

I had felt a bit bored of my current websites design, it was fun to mess around with svg’s and I still have some in the “Get in touch” section at the bottom of my website.

So I wanted to get rid of that, but I also wanted something that I noticed in a few sites, where the section you are visiting is being highlighted in a different way, compared to rest of sections.

However, for some reason, most tutorials using jekyll had some really extensive code that I was unable to figure out. So I decided to try stuff out and came up with my own solution.

Despite the solutions online didn’t work right away, I still got some inspiration from them, so I will leave a footnote to them if you wanna check them out. ^{1 2}

So this is my current navigation bar, I decided to add my recent profile picture, and the navbar is closer to the title, you can also see that my sections are all the same color.

In Jekyll, if you followed Kev’s tutorial about how to make a blog, you might already have the file ~/_data/navigation.yml, with a structure similar to this:

- name: Blog
  link: /blog/
- name: About
  link: /about/
- name: Contact
  link: /contact/
- name: Uses
  link: /uses/
- name: Tags
  link: /tags/

If that is the case, you only have to change your file in ~/_include/navigation.html To have the following contents: {% raw %}

<nav>
    {% for item in site.data.navigation %}
        {% if item.link == page.url %}
        <a class="nav-current" href="{{ item.link }}">{{ item.name }}</a>
        {% elsif page.url != item.link %}
        <a href="{{ item.link }}">{{ item.name }}</a>
        {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
</nav>

{% endraw %}

The key of all of this is the class nav-current, which can be used to customize the CSS of your element in any way you prefer. In my case, the webiste ended up looking like this:

I decided to simplify the design, get rid of the svg separators and change the color of the site’s title, as well as the obvious changes to the nav items.

Not every webiste will have the same styling as mine, so I don’t think sharing exactly how to configure each CSS property is necessary, but at least you now know how to separate your current section from the rest usilng Jekyll.

It is worth noting that if you are looking for a minimal website with minimal CSS, you could just add the style attribute to the code included in navigation.html which would make it so you dont need to configure a separate CSS file.

This is day 42 of #100DaystoOffload