fairyfox.io is a static Jekyll site with no external theme — the layouts, includes, and CSS are all hand-owned. It is built and deployed by GitHub Actions on every push, with no manual publishing step.

Stack

• Jekyll 4 (Ruby), with Kramdown (GitHub-flavoured Markdown) and Rouge syntax highlighting.
• No gem theme. Custom layouts, includes, and a single stylesheet, for full control over a small surface and no upgrade churn.
• Plugins: jekyll-feed (Atom feed), jekyll-seo-tag (head and Open Graph tags), and jekyll-sitemap.
• Build and deploy: GitHub Actions runs bundle exec jekyll build and publishes the result to GitHub Pages. Building with the project’s own Bundler and Jekyll — rather than GitHub’s built-in Pages-gem build — means the site is not restricted to GitHub’s plugin allowlist. See deployment.

Repository layout

.
├─ _config.yml          Jekyll config (excludes notes/, hub/, assets/references/)
├─ Gemfile              Jekyll + plugin dependencies
├─ VERSION              SemVer single source of truth
├─ CNAME                fairyfox.io custom domain
├─ index.html           Home — hero, projects, docs, latest updates
├─ projects.md          /projects/ — generated from _data/projects.yml
├─ blog.html            /blog/ — the updates index
├─ about.md             /about/
├─ downloads.md         /downloads/ — generated from _data/downloads.yml
├─ _docs/               the on-site documentation library (a Jekyll collection)
├─ _layouts/            default · page · post · doc
├─ _includes/           head · header · footer
├─ _posts/              update posts (YYYY-MM-DD-title.md)
├─ _data/               projects.yml · downloads.yml · doc_categories.yml
├─ assets/              css · favicon · references/ (read-only clones, ignored)
├─ .github/workflows/   pages.yml — build + deploy
├─ CLAUDE.md            entry point for an assistant opening the repo
├─ notes/              the living-notes knowledge base (excluded from the site)
└─ hub/                cross-project standards, templates, registry (excluded)

Three concerns, one repository

The repository deliberately holds three things that do not mix at build time:

1. The website — everything Jekyll renders into the published _site/.
2. The knowledge base — notes/ (the living documentation) and CLAUDE.md (the entry point for an AI assistant). Excluded from the site.
3. The hub — hub/ (the shared standards, templates, and project registry that other repositories adopt) and assets/references/ (read-only clones of those repositories, read in the other direction). Also excluded from the site.

Keeping all three in one repository is intentional: the hub is the home page’s repository, so there is exactly one thing to clone and one place the standards live. The exclude: list in _config.yml is what keeps the knowledge base and the hub out of the published site.

Generated versus authored

• Authored: the pages, posts, layouts, stylesheet, the documentation library, and the _data registries.
• Generated at build: _site/ (ignored), the Atom feed, the sitemap, and the SEO and Open Graph tags.
• Pulled, never committed: the read-only project clones under assets/references/ — see cross-project sync.

For the reasoning behind these choices, see design decisions; for how each part behaves at runtime, see the system map.