Show HN: A no-nonsense Jekyll theme for sensible blogging | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A no-nonsense Jekyll theme for sensible blogging

github.com

57 pointsamitmerchant29 comments

Immediate first impression: I don't like the font.

So I took a closer look at it and I think the gray is too bright and the font itself... Well, it isn't too bad, but I wouldn't consider it elegant nor readable.

Apart from the font, I like the clean look and minimal layout.

I hope this feedback helps to improve the theme for future versions ;-)

I was going to post the same thing, I bet it looks great on a retina mac screen, but on my windows machine with a monitor too big for 1080p, something about it feels off.

Otherwise I think it looks great though, nice job!

+1 on this.

Something easier to read, and—to match the posts description—elegant would make this a much more attractive theme.

Not that it's hard to swap it out for anyone who likes the theme otherwise, but worth considering changing since first impressions will influence downloads/usage.

color is off too... the grey is too light and hard to read.

The font is about 200% too big on my phone. It managed to display just about 15 lines and does not allow zooming out...

It's another case of a designer using a Light font weight (designed for large headings and posters) for body text instead of a Book weight which is actually designed by the font designer for body text usage. Font weight spectrums exist for a reason and the current trend of "all text should be Light weight" is just quite frustrating.

Worse, in trying to get some of the designer's own guidelines on the font's usage (designers generally are good about letting you know what they think their font is useful for), I find it is clearly a commercial font that doesn't have an open license, so this GitHub repository shouldn't even be distributing it.

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/futura-book/

Yep, font is awful.

Agreed. An incredibly distracting font. Workable as a title or subtitle font, but a horrible choice for body text.

It's faux-bolded for me here. They're serving 'FuturaPTLight' and letting the browser make it stronger. Looks rough to the eyes.

Futura is a nice typeface, I would argue, but it's not a very good body typeface. And the commenter who noted that (a) this is specifying the "light" weight rather than the regular weight is correct; that's just not a good choice for body text. The low contrast of #555 text on #FFF background compounds the problem. (That's technically a WCAG Level AAA-compliant contrast ratio, but at 7.45:1, just barely; I like lighter-than-pure-black text on darker-than-pure-white background, but I tend to aim for at least a 12:1 contrast ratio on a site I expect people to be, you know, reading lots of text on.)

That commenter is also right that Futura PT is a commercial, closed-source font, which makes this entire thing rather moot until this is fixed.

Also: if you're going to include custom typefaces, for the love of all that's holy, please include the italic and bold versions of the typeface if they exist and you expect users to use them. Letting browsers make fake bold is bad enough; letting them just slant text to make fake italics is eye-bleeding.

What are some good body fonts though? I would prefer stuff that is available on Windows. It's an eternal problem I struggle with, until I throw in the towel and say 'fuck it, let the user decide' and just put 'sans-serif' as the attribute. That, or use Arial.

That's always subjective, which isn't a great answer. I never really liked sans serif fonts for body text, but there are a few that have convinced me otherwise -- off the top of my head, Fira Sans, Lato, Open Sans, and Source Sans Pro are all good, and all available on Google Fonts to boot. (If you don't want to have any downloaded fonts, you're kind of stuck with either really lowest common denominator stuff or doing a font stack and being okay with fonts changing a little depending on OS. Calibri and Candara are widely available on Windows, but hit-or-miss on Mac and virtually non-existent on Linux, for instance.)

The theme is nice. Thanks. Forking it for my needs and will try to contribute back if I made meaningful edits. Will likely default the fonts to system fonts. ;-)

Unless otherwise in dire need and the design is really augmented by a custom font, I'd like a thing for the web to stay with standard/system web-safe fonts. It works and can still be a really well-done typed website.

for me, it is actually a big eye strain trying to read this font.

Maybe this will get some downvotes, but I don't get why this is on HN. There are plenty of Jekyll themes out there, does this one stand out in some way?

It is quite elegant though!

> does this one stand out in some way

Maybe that's what the bullet points under "Features overview" are for :-)

Yes, and I read it, but none of it struck me as being remarkable :-)

Please don't misunderstand, I do not intend to knock the project in any way, it seems excellent, just similar to others that already exist.

I agree, this doesn't seem like it really belongs on HN, it's a very generic theme with a bad font choice that was chosen based on the font being used on pixar.com?!? . Maybe if this was a theme that had something interesting based on research or some interesting theory behind it, then yeah, it would be of interest on HN.

- Google Analytics integration

Built-in spying on users and exposing them to a more or less hostile third-party is worse than nonsense.

- A home widget to show recent GitHub commit

That is total nonsense for sensible blogging. ;p

I also have my own a simple Jekyll theme here focused on using open-source typography: https://github.com/robenkleene/cyclist

As much as I hate kowtowing to google, if you want people to actually find what you write on your blog, you have to worry about implementing proper meta/open graph tags, structured data, dynamic site map, and even AMP support.

I have yet to find a good static site generator theme that actually implements all of the above...and it’s a major PITA to have to implement every time.

Hey! This is my kind of thing.

Curious what you've tried and why it hasn't worked for you? Especially regarding AMP support: is that a necessary feature for SEO-driven blogging these days?

OP, please add curated to the project description. I only sensibly blog with curated themes.

There are way too many issues with design:

- Grey reduces contrast for black forecolors, not good for long comfortable reading

- Font are too squeezed for comfortable reading

- lines sprouting out from heading are unnecessarily distracting

- Default always-ON scroll bars are truly ugly

First thought: The footer moves up the page when the content isn't long enough. It should be sticky.

Why? It’s so easy to make a Jekyll site / theme from scratch.

Looks like the author put some work in ("...a fork of jekyll-now with some additional features and personal touches which I've implemented to suit my needs for my blog") and they thought others may find it useful. Sometimes that's how open source works; every project doesn't have to be a category-defining framework.

Nicely done!

In case people are visiting the discussion looking for more no-nonsense Jekyll theme recommendations, I recently came across this beautiful collection that seems to fit the bill: https://mademistakes.com/work/jekyll-themes/

Something is making it slow.

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