weblog — old-school ghost 5.0 theme

Weblog — an old-school Ghost theme for the new golden era of blogging.

FEATURES

• Insanely fast. This may be the fastest Ghost theme in the known universe. Weblog scores 98/100 on Google pagespeed. The homepage loads in milliseconds. This kind of performance makes your blog rank higher in search engines, means more people read what you have to say, and saves you — and your readers — money.

• Ready for Ghost 5.0 and beyond. With weblog, your blog is ready for the future. I’ve been coding hand-crafted Ghost themes since the first public release of the blogging platform. This theme incorporates what I’ve learned building and maintaining three previous themes.

• Ready-to-roll with smart defaults. Everything you’d expect from a Ghost theme is there. You get a homepage with an old-fashioned list of posts, reasonable metadata below the title of each post, a little author bio at the end of each post, a menu with a list of links, a nice page for each tag, a polite email opt-in form, and more.

• Super modular. Weblog makes use of handlebar partials to break things into neat, self-contained modules. Add and remove functionality without code-surgery.

• Cleanly coded and comprehensively commented. The code is nice and clean, and W3C valid.

• No bloat, no bling, no compromises. What makes the weblog theme special isn’t the features it has, but the unnecessary features it doesn’t have. Weblog isn’t backward, but it takes an Amish approach to what’s necessary. It looks rustic, but don’t be fooled: the good stuff is all under the hood.

• No JavaScript. That’s right: not one line of JavaScript. This means no sneaky tracking. No analytics. No pretty but ambiguous icons, distracting animations, or fancy fonts to slow down your blog. Just words. Words that can be viewed on any device. Words that can be read on an Apple IIe. Words that can be read from command-line, text-based browsers. Words that will stand the test of time.

• No 3rd-party comments. Say goodbye to flamewars at the end of every post, endless moderation queues, and bloated, tracking-laden third-party commenting engines.

• No CSS preprocessors. Sass? Less?? Stylus??? Nope. Just plain old fast, reliable CSS. And not much of it, either.

• No bandwidth-hogging stock photos of people in suits drawing on whiteboards. You can use images in your posts, but you don’t have to fill your posts up with unnecessary stock photos just so that your theme doesn’t break.

• Rugged beauty. Weblog has no bling, but the simple design has a rugged beauty of its own: the beauty of function. The beauty of something that has one job, but does it well. And these days, that’s unique. When was the last time you saw a website this honest lookin’?

WHO IS WEBLOG FOR?

The iconoclast. The speed freak. The geezer. The privacy geek. The lone-wolf. The eco-conscious. The magazine that wants people to be able to read its journalism on a flip phone during a hurricane.

Is it for you? Take a look and decide what you think. And if this theme is too old-school, check out my other themes, Mnml (http://github.com/curiositry/mnml-ghost-theme) (free) and Laminim (https://creativemarket.com/Curiositry/1037280) (premium).