Minimalistically: a clear & ready-to-use blog template
Minimalistically is a ready-to-use blog template, based on the Eleventy (11ty) blog engine. It is designed to be very clear, and with all the features you can expect for a personal blog.
Characteristics of your future blog
➡️ Minimalistic and typography-optimized design
➡️ Write in Markdown with support for embedding code source
➡️ Perfectly responsive, with a mobile-first design
➡️ Blazing fast, with automatically optimized images
➡️ Accessible, and works with and without JavaScript
➡️ 100% customizable, with access to a whole plugins ecosystem
➡️ Static pages and blog posts
➡️ Light & dark themes
➡️ Atom feed
➡️ Cover pictures for blog posts
➡️ 🌟 Meta-info for sharing on Twitter
➡️ 🌟 Full-text search
➡️ All the source code of the blog template in a ZIP file.
➡️ A PDF manual to set up your blog and publish your first posts.
➡️ 🌟 A PDF guide to go further with the customization of your blog:
- Continuous deployment with Netlify
- Add comments with Disqus
- Customize the layout
- Add tags to posts
➡️ 🌟 6-month e-mail support
➡️ 🌟🌟 A 30-minutes video call with me so I can help you to set up your blog, or for any question you have!
💬 What is needed to use the template?
To set up your blog and start writing in it, you will need a local environment with Node.js installed. You will also need an editor; I recommend VSCode.
To publish your blog, all you will need is somewhere to put some files so they are available to everyone; in the provided manual I will show you some free options.
Note that you don’t need to be a web developer to start using the template, but it is recommended to have basic notions of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript if you want to start customizing it.
💬 It’s nice, but isn’t it just a theme?
It is so much more than a theme. A theme will change the appearance of a blog or a website, but this template does not come just with a clean user interface. It includes a lot of features and optimizations, that usually take a lot of effort to set up.
For instance, did you know that this template automatically resizes images during the build phase, and generates several image formats so the visitor’s browser only downloads what is necessary, depending on the device type and the screen size?
Or have you noticed that the light/dark theme is set automatically, based on the visitor’s browser or OS preference, but there is still a switch in the footer to set it explicitly if wanted?
💬 What if I want to customize it more?
Here is the good news: this template is based on the Eleventy (11ty) blog engine, so it gives you access to all the wonderful plugins that are available in its ecosystem.
Plus, since being a web developer is also my day job (and I’m pretty good at it), I took extra care of providing very clean source code. So if you want to customize the HTML layout, or the CSS styles, or the JavaScript, you should be able to understand everything.