Lots of thanks and a bit of story
18 Apr 2019
Here is a short story of how this theme came to be, the many great tools i came to know in the process, and the places and people i stole ideas from.
So i decided it was time to have a personal web page, got from github-pages to jekyll and within an hour i was completely convinced it was the way to go. I then started looking at personal pages from contributors to repos I’m interested in, trying to make my mind about what kind of site i wanted. I am not much of a writer, so the common layout in which the home page is a blog was not well suited for me. I found this page by Paul Staab and new that was the kind of layout i needed. A simple home page with a nice background image, and flexibility to include blog–like pages in the navbar. However the rest of that theme didn’t quite fit what i had in mind.
Looking for similar jekyll themes i came accross two outstanding ones that almost covered what i wanted: Moon, by Taylan Tatli; and Type on Strap, by Sylhare. The beautiful Moon theme had the background image but not much space for an intro message. Type on Strap could accomodate a message but the background image does not cover the whole viewport, and again the home page has the blog on it. At this point i still intended to tweak one of these themes to accomodate my needs, and in trying to do so i realized that i didn’t understand enough about the process to do so. That’s why i decided i needed to build my own from scratch, in order to grasp the whole workflow of site generation.
My journey to this point had taught me that responsiveness is as crucial as it is hard to achieve, so i chose to base the theme on bootstrap. I found a template close to what i wanted, the amazing Cover by Mark Otto, and started dimantling it. This theme got something from each of these. I want to thank each of these developers/designers, and the Open Source community for sharing their work with all of us. You really make this world a better place!