Improve blog site theme

[kmpaul]

Need to improve the xdev blog theme. We like the carpet theme, but that only works with Nikola version 7. We need something that we can use with Nikola version 8.

[kmpaul]

Ok. It looks like Nikola just doesn't have the traction to get a large theme list, yet. So, I found this tutorial describing how to port a Jekyll theme to Nikola and this site showing all of the free Jekyll themes.

@jukent @andersy005 What theme do you two like from this page the most? I will do the effort to port it from Jekyll to Nikola.

[kmpaul]

Note that the Carte-Noire Theme is created by Jacob Tomlinson!

[kmpaul]

Incidentally, you can also look at the blog-specific Jekyll themes but this includes themes that require payment, too.

[kmpaul]

Here are some live demos of free Jekyll blog themes that I like, so far:

• Flexible-Jekyll
• Carte Noire
• Jasper

But there may be others that you like. Just let me know.

[jukent]

Out of those three I like 'Flexible-Jekyll' the best. It looks very clean to me (as does Jasper, but I don't love having to scroll before seeing the first post).

[kmpaul]

Agree about the Jasper theme; I don't like having to scroll a whole page before seeing the first post, either. However, I was wondering if we could make that image section (i.e., 1st page) just a fixed height bar on the top. Wasn't sure how hard that would be.

I like Flexible-Jekyll a lot. I'll try to port that one. I think we can tune it to our purposes quite nicely.

[kmpaul]

UPDATE: Current issues:

• Automatic generation of post excerpt? Or tag in post content?
• NCAR Logo and image in footer
• Optional post banner image
• Post page layout
• Author link color
• Post title font
• Post hover animations
• Incorporate packages page into theme

[kmpaul]

I believe this is mostly done, but we should review this at the meeting today.

[kmpaul]

Need to ask Eric about NSF logo/branding requirements. Otherwise, I think this is close.