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| title | date | description | categories | dropCap | displayInMenu | displayInList | draft | resources | ||||||||||
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| Aether: A Clean Theme for Hugo | 2018-05-02T14:33:42-04:00 | Aether is new theme for Hugo that emphasizes motion, material, and depth as design elements. Distracting styling and page elements are forgone to focus on the content. |
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Today's web is a frustrating mess of pop-ups, intrusive banners, and ads obstructing the content. I designed aether to be free of all these distractions and simply highlight the content. The result feels more like a native application than a website. Interactions are intuitive, content is the focus, and distractions are omitted.
Aether is a Hugo theme for blogs that elevates good writing and photography. If you use Hugo for your blog, give aether a try.
Installation
In the root directory of your Hugo Project, clone the aether repo into the themes directory.
git clone https://github.com/josephhutch/aether.git themes/aether
Usage
Website Configuration
Add the following parameters to your config file if they are not present already.
baseURL = "https://yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com"
languageCode = "your language code"
title = "your website title"
theme = "aether"
googleAnalytics = "Your google analytics tracking ID"
[params]
brand = "the title displayed in the nav bar - optional"
description = "your website's description"
homeimg = "url to the image used for the home button - optional"
bgimg = "url to the image used for the background - optional"
The title parameter is used for each page title, the title that search engines display in search results. If you would like the title shown in the top left of the page to be different from the page title, use the brand parameter. For instance, the title parameter for my site is Joe Hutchinson but the brand parameter is set to joehutch.
The homeimg and bgimg parameters give you the ability to customize the look of your site further. The homeimg parameter is the image used for the home button at the bottom of every page. Since the text used on the home button is white, a darker background image is preferred. If the homeimg parameter is not specified, a fallback image is used. Similarly, the bgimg parameter is used for the background of each webpage. Aether is designed to look best with a subtle tiling image for the background. If no background image is specified, the background will be a solid gray color.
That is the only configuration required at the site level! You can now begin writing content for your site.
Creating content
Make a new blog post by executing hugo new posts/postnamehere/index.md in your shell. At the top of the new markdown file, is what's called the front matter. The front matter is the page's metadata that determines how Hugo and aether generate the HTML for your post. Below you can find what the front matter should contain for a new post and what each of the parameters mean.
---
title: "The title of your post"
date: date the post was generated
description: "Description of the post (displayed in the post's card)"
categories: ["add comma separated categories here", "another category"]
featuredImage: "url to the page's featured image"
featuredImageDescription: "Description for the featured image, used as the alt text"
dropCap: if the first letter should be a large decorative capital letter (true, false)
displayInMenu: if post is listed in the navigation menu (true, false)
displayInList: if post is listed on the home page and category pages (true, false)
draft: if the page is a draft (true, false)
---
The displayInMenu and displayInList parameters are used to determine where your content is displayed. Posts typically have displayInMenu set to false so that the post is not a menu option, and displayInList set to true so it shows up on the homepage's list of posts and in category page lists. An About Me page, on the other hand, would have displayInMenu set to true and displayInList set to false. That will allow the About Me page to be accessible from the menu but not displayed in the homepage's list of posts.
The categories parameter is used to group similar posts in category pages. Category pages are accessible from the menu and list all posts with the same category.
The dropCap parameter is used to determine if the first letter of a post should be a dropped capital. A dropped capital letter is the large decorative letter at the beginning of a book or section.
Add an interesting description and a good image to each post to get the most value from this theme.
Aether takes advantage of page bundles to optimize your images for your site. This may require you to update the way your content is structured, also see content organization. Use the image and smallimg shortcodes to take full advantage of image optimization.
Posts are written in markdown and LaTeX (for math symbols and equations). You can find tons of information on how to format your posts with markdown and LaTeX on the web.
Further Customization
To change the heading and subtext at the top of list pages just add a _index.md file in the folder that the list page is generated from. For example to change the heading at the top of the homepage, add an _index.md file to the content folder with the following parameters.
---
title: "This is the main heading text in big letters"
date: the date
description: "This is the subtext above the main heading in small letters"
---
Learn More
To learn more about aether, visit aether's Github page. To learn more about Hugo, visit Hugo's website.