I have solved the problems I was having with the Jekyll configuration for my GitHub Pages. It seems that the version of the minima theme used by GitHub is an older release; it was necessary to use a remote-theme setting to pull down the latest version of the theme to support all the documented features.

The breakthrough was as simple as reading the _config.yml file used by the GitHub Pages for the jekyll/minima theme itself:

Configuration changes

All that was really needed was to comment out the theme setting and replace it with a remote-theme setting, like so:

# As of November 2023, GitHub Pages still uses Minima 2.5.1
# (https://pages.github.com/versions/).
# If you want to use the latest Minima version on GitHub Pages, use the
# following setting and add comment out the "theme: minima" line.
remote_theme: jekyll/minima
# theme: minima

Features enabled

This has ensured that the following features (and probably some others I haven’t found) now work:

  • Skins
  • Social media icons & links