New Blog Theme: Twenty Fifteen

With Google rolling out an update penalizing non-mobile friendly sites, and my non-responsive website theme dating from 2009, I thought it was a good time to give my nanoc-based static blog a makeover.

I looked around for something lightweight, minimalistic, responsive, and easy to customize, and finally settled on using the latest default WordPress theme, Twenty Fifteen. Although it’s is a bit light to my taste on larger screens, it really shines on mobile devices. And you can easily get rid of the boring look (which you get when you look for ‘minimalistic’) by using theme features such as the large post thumbnail images, and optionally adding some color.

Since I use nanoc, a static website generator, instead of WordPress, I had to port the theme so it works with my nanoc setup. Fortunately, Twenty Fifteen is cleanly written, so porting the theme was pretty straightforward.

Here is a list of changes I did for my nanoc setup:

• Added support for header images on posts and pages.
• Added support for link posts, so I could add links to my BookWidgets posts. Twenty Fifteen comes with many other post types, which can be trivially added when needed.
• Added support for infinite scrolling, automatically appending articles to the blog’s front page list as you reach the end of the list.
• Added support for live, incremental search.
• Added a task to automatically generate my favicons using Real Favicon Generator
• Removed support for categories, because I never could figure out in which category to post things.
• Did some more optimizations, described in more detail here.

For the details, have a look at the code of my blog skeleton.