NLO — a multilingual Jekyll theme

A standalone fork of Chirpy, built for multilingual GitHub Pages blogs.

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NLO is a self-maintained fork of jekyll-theme-chirpy. It keeps Chirpy's clean writing-first layout and adds the features a real production blog ends up needing — multiple languages, a GitHub contribution chart, brand logo, and opt-in AdSense — all driven from _config.yml so the theme source stays untouched.

The repository is meant for long-term customization instead of editing a theme directly inside a production blog repo.

Highlights

Feature	What it does
🌍 Multilingual	Comma-separated lang: renders a flag language switcher; posts are linked across languages by translation_key.
📊 GitHub chart	Contribution graph blocks on the home page and sidebar.
🖼️ Branding logo	Optional logo injected into the sidebar title.
💸 AdSense	Optional, per-post ad script (only where you set ads: true).
🌗 Light / dark toggle	Light by default, one-click dark mode from the sidebar.
🤖 dumalog-ready	Fully supported as a publishing target for the dumalog AI writing agent.

Quick start

bundle install
npm install        # frontend assets (Bootstrap, custom JS)
npm run build      # compile CSS + JS into assets/
bundle exec jekyll serve

Use the theme either as a gem (theme: jekyll-theme-nlo) or vendored (copy the theme folders into your blog and drop the theme: key). Both modes are supported; the footer version and cached asset paths resolve correctly in each. See MIGRATION_CHECKLIST.md for moving an existing Chirpy blog over.

Configuration

Everything theme-specific lives under the nlo: block in _config.yml:

# One language, or a comma-separated list to enable the switcher.
# The first entry is the default (its posts live at the site root).
lang: en, ru-RU, fr-FR

nlo:
  github_chart:
    enabled: false
    home_image: /assets/img/githubchart.svg
    sidebar_image: /assets/img/githubchart-sidebar.svg
  branding:
    logo_src:            # e.g. /assets/img/logo_nlo.png
    logo_alt:
    logo_aria_label:
  adsense:
    client:              # e.g. ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

# Leave empty to show the light/dark toggle (light is the default view).
# Set to `light` or `dark` to pin the site to one mode and hide the toggle.
theme_mode:

Multilingual posts

Give every post a language and a shared translation_key. Translations live under language subfolders and carry their own permalink:

_posts/2026-07-10-my-post.md              # language: en   (default)
_posts/ru/2026-07-10-my-post.md           # language: ru-RU
_posts/fr/2026-07-10-my-post.md           # language: fr-FR

---
title: My post
language: en
translation_key: my-post
---

Posts sharing a translation_key are cross-linked by the sidebar language switcher.

Integration with dumalog

NLO is a first-class publishing target for dumalog, the AI agent that turns your dev-chat history into blog posts. dumalog emits standard Jekyll posts with front matter (title, date, categories, tags, image, …) — exactly what NLO renders, including its language / translation_key multilingual fields. Point dumalog at an NLO blog and generated posts publish with no extra formatting step:

dumalog add-blog ~/Git/your-nlo-blog
dumalog write

Version mechanism

The theme version shown in the footer comes from a single source of truth:

• Gem installs read theme.version from the gemspec.
• Vendored installs fall back to _data/nlo.yml (version:).

tools/release.sh keeps package.json, the gemspec, and _data/nlo.yml in sync on every release, so the number in the footer always matches the shipped version.

Local visual editor

NLO bundles a customizable jekyll-admin fork for browser-based editing:

bash tools/run.sh --admin   # then open http://127.0.0.1:4000/admin

The /admin UI is served from the local admin/ fork (admin/index.html, admin/nlo-admin.css, admin/nlo-admin.js, mounted by _plugins/jekyll-admin-fork.rb), so it can be themed without touching the upstream gem.

Translation matrix

Generate a machine-readable translation-status table (handy for AI translation workflows):

ruby tools/generate-translation-matrix.rb
# → docs/translation-matrix.md, docs/translation-matrix.csv

License

MIT — see LICENSE and NOTICE.md.