Hide - the Jekyll & Hyde Theme, WordPress Edition
The evil art of appending CSS code.
Unfortunately CSS has a tendency to be endlessly appended, especially in large codebases and lazy or underfunded devs - this usually spells bad news for future development and a full refactoring is soon in order!
However, appended CSS has it's time and place and this is one of them...
A WordPress.org "Twenty Fifteen" theme modification to look just like "Hyde," a fantastic theme for Jekyll (another website/blog software somewhat like WordPress).
Problems
A love for simplicity and minimalism can be a rare commodity in development nowadays, yet it's especially important in programming - it's always the answer for long-term gains - and WordPress really doesn't fit that bill, in an ideal world I'd be statically-generating my blog propagating it onto some robust CDN edge nodes right from git in the command line - serverless style.
Jekyll is a great software to do just that, statically generate beautiful sites and blogs - and it has an even greater theme called "Hyde" by @mdo which has been famous in various development communities.
But, the world is rarely ideal, and full of buzz-words - so I've settled with encouraging productivity with WordPress, for now...
WordPress themes can be a nightmare for dependency issues, customisation and excessive loads of bloat - and after shopping around I couldn't really find any free and open themes that were simple enough but also scratched the itch just like Hyde does. Although, the WordPress.org "Twenty Fifteen" comes close in a somewhat ugly second place...
Solution
A few moments and ~100 lines of CSS code later, and we have it.
The beautiful design and typography of Hyde with the simpleness and bloat free upstream stability of "Twenty Fifteen".
Slap these ~100 lines into the 'Additional CSS' section of the Customise Theme UI in WordPress and you've got yourself a Hyde WordPress theme, simple and updatable without too much additional bloat or breaking changes down-the-line.
At the time of writing this blog benhoskins.dev is using my new "Hide" theme (...more of a mod than a theme really).
Check out "Hide, the Hyde theme WordPress Edition" on GitHub.
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