exaaactly

This website, at time of writing, is built with Hugo. Hugo is an open-source static site generator. It lets people quickly create websites just by defining a few Markdown files and selecting one of their hundreds of free themes. When I went through through the process, I was quickly enamoured by the ease of creating a sample website and populating it with my first few blog posts. But I didn’t like how it looked.

Most themes are too complicated and kludgy for my tastes, with overengineered animations and labrynthine CSS. I believe the focus of a website should be the content, not the styling.

Some themes are more minimalist, but most seem more like demonstrations of what a blog could look like, rather than something I would actually be inclined to use. Besides, by dint of being minimalist, they aren’t customizable enough to meet my specific vision of how a site should look.

Doing It Myself #

I created exaaactly, a minimalist and opinionated Hugo theme. It has exaaactly what a website needs, and nothing else. It’s goal is to be simple, intuitive, and elegant.

The theme exclusively uses a monospaced font, giving formatting/style consistency while also hinting at a “hacker” aesthetic. It takes advantage of the Selenized White color scheme, a variant of the classic Solarized scheme that improves contrast and legibility. List pages (such as the home page and taxonomy pages) are optimized to display six items at a time, either in 3x2, 2x3, or 1x6 format depending on screen width.

Customizability is not a design concern. If you want to use exaaactly but don’t agree with my design decisions, I invite you to fork it. Or make your own theme from scratch. It’s not that hard, and it’s pretty fun to learn.