Nathan Hoad

New Blog Theme

April 3, 2013

I got tired of my old theme, and made a new one.

I’ll be honest, it’s heavily borrowed from Kyle Isom’s website, which was in turn borrowed from Wally’s Jekyll theme. I really like the clean, minimalistic look.

As a result, my website is largely based on Bootstrap, which is always nice.

I’ve also added compile-time syntax-highlighting with Markdown’s codehilite plugin, which is a wrapper around Pygments. Much nicer to look at.

I considered moving to a real static-site generator, rather than using my home-grown one. I looked at Jekyll and Pelican, and found them to be just as I remembered; way too complicated, and light on the documentation.

I think it’s strange that something so prolific should be hard to use, and poorly documented. The idea of a statically generated site is to minimise work. They claim to be simple, but the tutorials always leave me wondering what to do next, and frankly I can’t be bothered looking much further after that.

So I’m sticking with my home-grown solution. Support is better, anyway ;)