It's finally done: my first ever open source Gatsby theme, (obviously) inspired by my blog, called Nehalem. Visit nehalem.netlify.com for a live demo and GitHub for the source code!

Features

I tried my best to adapt some of my favorite features from my blog:

  • It's fully repsonsive
  • Highly optimized in terms of performance, accessibility and SEO
  • It's easily customizable
  • Comes with a tagging system
  • Comes with archives for posts and tags
  • Supports syntax highlighting
  • Fully typed with TypeScript
  • Offers search functionality right out of the box

Check here for a detailed list of all features!

Download

In case you're interested in using this theme for your blog check the Getting Started guide!

If you like the theme feel free to leave it a like on GitHub.

Differences to my blog

While my blog was never meant to be used anywhere except here, Nehalem was created with usability in mind. It's implementation follows best practices, it's customizable and it is actively maintained.

Some examples:

  • my blog does not handle posts without headings very well. That's the reason why I've added headings to all posts before releasing the redesign. Nehalem centers the layout in case no table of contents could be generated which looks way more appealing.
  • my blog has some bugs which I just don't intend to fix as long as I don't have nothing else to do. Bugs are prioritized just by myself - meaning that some may never be fixed. As long as I can live with that everything's fine. Nehalem is meant to be used by others, hence bugs are always treated more seriously and fixed as soon as possible.
  • my blog is the first iteration of the current design while Nehalem is kind of a successor to it. Things are more mature, better handled or simply look better.
  • my blog was my first experience with Gatsby. It's implementation is partially really not that beautiful. But I learned from it - and put this knowledge into the implementation of Nehalem.

This list could go on for quite some time - but I guess you get the point.

Future

Nehalem had to be done before 1st of August because of the Gatsby Theme Jam - but I do have some plans for the future.

My highest priority for v1.1 is to add the capability to support multiple post providers so you can quickly switch to another data source than Markdown (which is the default).

Other feature requests may appear over time - we'll see how everything works out. For now I'm just happy to be done with it and can take my time for the next feature release!

I hope you like the theme and enjoy using it (and in that case feel free to star it on GitHub)!