🥰 Finally! I Created My Own Theme!
This website now uses freedom hugo theme.
I created this theme and it’s really a cool moment for me.
I have been using below themes for my previous versions -
… they are excellent themes, but for some reason they always felt incomplete to me. With all due respect, there is nothing wrong with them - it’s just me being overly nitpicky.
I would find a particular thing not working or working in a way slightly different to how I want it and start tweaking template or css files. Soon, I had reached a point where theme was so heavily modded that I was no longer able to pull any latest changes made by original authors.
There’s another reason, no it’s not for bragging rights or showing off my skills. Heck, I am not even a web developer.
It’s AI. No, don’t go away, just hear me out!
One of the reasons I was able to make this theme should be attributed to Generative AI (Github Copilot + Claude Sonnet 4.5 4.6 Model).
I am a data engineer myself, and just know very basics of web dev. But, web development, especially front end development always had a special place in my heart! In fact, I started my college engineering journey with a website development project.
Good old days 👴🏼!
If you are wondering whether this entire theme was completely vibed with AI? No, I would say 60% of it was hand-crafted framework code that I wrote to give AI a starting point. Other 20% purely vibes!
And honestly this is the best use-case for AI. It helps you write code in a language or framework you are not very familiar with, and still have a good chance of it working the way you want it to.
Okay, I don’t want it to turn into a technical post, instead I want to showcase look of the theme and some of its features.
Starting with homepage :
Clicking on “More >” link at the end of recent post takes you to archive :
Section pages like Blog & Code :
All links with a # prepended to them are tags
:
Individual post page, with title and meta details about post:
Also a few other quirks in theme that makes it kinda interesting are :
- Support for various blockquotes styles and alert blockquotes .
- Support for custom dark & light mode chroma highlighting .
- Support for customizations of image , table , blockquote & codeblock rendering.
- Add support for a whole lot of shortcodes and partials
Since this theme is under active development, screenshots provided above may have become outdated by the time you read this post. So, I would recommend you to check out demo site for latest and greatest experience of the theme.
Hope you find this theme interesting.