layout: page title: Main Page further_reading:

HAM 🥩

HAM is a Jekyll-based boilerplate template for generating better, static wiki-style websites. HAM can be instantly used to build static wiki pages. But the best of all, the default theme of HAM can be easily customized to create more personalized wiki pages, unlike those from MediaWiki, for example.

This project is built to replace the current, MediaWiki installation at after I found out difficult to create custom styles for it, while other, Git-based alternatives such as GitHub Wiki sucks (no, really) and may not support self-hosting on shared hosting providers.

What does HAM stand for?

HAM is short for:

  • Hackapedia's Abstraction Machine
  • HAM Ain't MediaWiki
  • [Halfmoon] and Markdown
  • && i++ (can we get more pull requests to add more stuff into this list?)

Features

What HAM is

  • [x] A static-site wiki generator
  • [x] A better alternative than GitHub pages
  • [x] Highly customizable through [Halfmoon] and [Jekyll]
  • [x] Uses GitHub-Flavored Markdown (GFM)
  • [x] Optimized for GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages

What HAM isn't

  • [ ] Optimized for large wiki content (this is where advanced alternatives such as [MediaWiki] excels at)
  • [ ] Built-in support for hosting content written in MediaWiki markup syntax (however there are converters to Markdown)
  • [ ] Supported in legacy web browsers (see Compatibility)

What HAM would be

  • [ ] Supporting Forem (DEV.to) liquid tags (YouTube embeds, Twitter posts, etc.)

Usage

For GitHub Pages

If you would like to add this theme into your GitHub Pages website, please just add the following on your _config.yml

remote_theme: reinhart1010/HAM

Note that this instruction will only work if you still opt in to GitHub Pages' "classic" experience - the same old workflow without having to write your own GitHub Actions. Users who opt in to use GitHub Actions instead should install this as a regular Gem-based theme.

The best part of this is that you can get the latest version of HAM without manually requiring it on your Gemfile, as long as you have updated your page frequently (GitHub will fetch the current available version of the HAM "theme").

As a Gem-based theme

HAM is also available as a Gem-based theme on the official Ruby gems repository. If you are unsure on installing gem-based themes like this one, check out the official Jekyll documentation for that.

If you have just created a new site with jekyll new <PATH> chances are that you're using the default, Minima theme instead of HAM. If that's the case, replace the line which begins with

gem "minima"

on your Gemfile with

gem "jekyll-ham", "~> 0.2.3"

Also don't forget to change the theme configuration on your _config.yml to jekyll-ham instead of minima.

Site does not load properly after first jekyll build?

In previous versions of HAM (0.1.5 and earlier), all of your Markdown and HTML files must include the following frontmatter:

---
layout: page
---

However, as of 0.1.6 jekyll-optional-front-matter has been included and configured by default to remove this requirement, which allows easier content migration for future wikis.

Configuration

HAM also introduces additional configuration which you can set on your _config.yml:

Site Identity

ham:
  site_icon: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/main/svg/emoji_u1f969.svg # Your site icon, to be displayed on navbar
  site_favicon: null # Your site favicon, in case you have a spare favicon.ico for it
  site_meta:
    - name: google-site-verification
      content: AAAAAA
    - name: msvalidate.01
      content: BBBBBB
  contributing: # Additional metadata for "Contribute to This Page" section on sidebar
    discuss: # For "Discuss" (or "Talk page" on MediaWiki)
      type: url | custom | facebook | giscus | telegram | utterances
      url: https://github.com/reinhart1010/HAM/discussions/
    view_source_base_url: https://github.com/reinhart1010/HAM/blob/main/ # The base URL to publicly view the original (Markdown) source code
    issue_url: https://github.com/reinhart1010/HAM/issues/ # The URL to report an issue related to site or content

Comments

HAM provides built-in support for Facebook, Giscus, Telegram, and Utteranc.es widgets plugins. However, you can also add your own widgets or links by following these instructions.

URL (Default)

If you have a dedicated forum or discussion webpage, such as GitHub Discussions, you can link them directly to all HAM pages by setting Jekyll's _config.yml as below.

ham:
  contributing:
    discuss:
      type: url
      url: https://github.com/reinhart1010/HAM/discussions/

Custom Comments Widget (HTML code)

You can use an custom-made comments widget (e.g. JavaScript-based or <iframe> element) into HAM by placing the code under _includes/custom-comments.html. You can also use Jekyll-specific variables and attributes including {{ site.url }} to render custom widget code.

ham:
  contributing:
    discuss:
      type: custom

Facebook

HAM includes an external JavaScript from Facebook in order to render the Facebook Comments Widget. You are also required to register your website as an app on Facebook, switch from Development Mode to Live/Public Mode, and insert your App ID and preferred language into the configuration below.

ham:
  contributing:
    discuss:
      type: facebook
      facebook_app_id: 123456789
      lang: en_US

Giscus

Giscus is yet another comment widget plugin powered by GitHub Discussions. To set up Giscus for HAM, follow their installation instructions, and modify the _config.yml according to the values obtained from the generated HTML snippet.

ham:
  contributing:
    discuss:
      type: utterances
      repo: data-repo
      repo_id: data-repo-id
      category: data-category
      category_id: data-category-id
      mapping: data-mapping
      reactions_enabled: data-reactions-enabled
      emit_metadata: data-emit-metadata
      theme: data-theme # "preferred_color_scheme" is preferred to allow HAM's dark mode integration to work smoothly
      lang: data-lang

Telegram (@DiscussBot)

HAM supports for Telegram's @DiscussBot web comments widget. This widget may not sync with comments on Telegram channels set up via discussion groups.

To set up the widget, follow the instructions provided on https://comments.app under your Telegram account, and modify the _config.yml according to the values obtained from the generated HTML snippet.

ham:
  contributing:
    discuss:
      type: telegram
      telegram_discussion: data-telegram-discussion

Utterances

DEPRECATED: The value utteranc.es has been deprecated, removed, and replaced with utterances (without the dot).

Utterances is yet another comment widget plugin powered by GitHub Issues. To set up Utterances for HAM, follow their installation instructions, and modify the _config.yml according to the values obtained from the generated HTML snippet.

ham:
  contributing:
    discuss:
      type: utterances
      repo: data-repo
      issue_term: issue_term # optional
      theme: theme # "preferred-color-scheme" is preferred to allow HAM's dark mode integration to work smoothly

Browser Compatibility

HAM heavily uses [Halfmoon] CSS framework on the generated page due to its theming flexibility based on CSS variables. However, that comes with a cost: CSS variables are not supported in old browsers. If you're thinking of Internet Explorer 11, well, don't think too far, because this exact feature may not be supported on some smart TV models, too! There are plans to either include a JavaScript-based polyfill or fallback CSS for this, but I might want to do that later.

[Halfmoon]: https://gethalfmoon.com [Jekyll]: https://jekyllrb.com [MediaWiki]: https://mediawiki.org

Credits & Open Source Licenses

Copyright (c) 2021-2023 Reinhart Previano Koentjoro.

This project is distributed under MIT License, and also uses the following open-source components: