In 2014, I wrote a custom theme for Pelican, the static site generator I use for this site.

At the time, there were few themes available and I wanted something that was fairly simple in its design, but also that I understood well enough to tweak as necessary. I opted to use Skeleton for the theme's general structure, but also added a fair amount of custom CSS to get things the way I wanted.

But over time all that custom CSS became more of a pain than it was worth. I wanted something I could just drop in and have it look nice.

Yesterday I came across new.css, which I feel achieves its goal of sensible design and classless CSS. It allowed me to quickly create a new Pelican theme with limited CSS-fiddling.

The new theme, which I've named newbird, includes support for Google Analytics, Twitter Cards, and Facebook Open Graph. It also allows for articles to be written in Jupyter Notebooks thanks to Pelican's liquid tags plugin. Notably, I opted not to include any social sharing buttons in order to decrease clutter and page loads.

If you're interested in using newbird for your Pelican-based site, you can find it here.