Brahma

Brahma is a Hugo static site generator theme. The goal of the theme is to accomodate my blogging needs and to provide a platform to share my work and thoughts. It is build to be fast, simple and accessible.

Technologies used

• HTML5
• Tailwind CSS
• Hugo

Design decisions

• Build for the long term.
• Aesthetics over over-engineering.
• Functionality over aesthetics
• Avoid unnecessary dependencies.
• Lighthouse scores are just the start.
• Maximum performance without compromising on funcionality and aesthetics.
• Least amount of JavaScript necessary.

History

https://www.unsungnovelty.org at the beginning used Cocoah-Enhanced as it’s theme. Brahma was born out of necessity to accomodate my needs for performance, functionalities and de-googling.

Below are the first 3 iterations of the Brahma theme. The initial idea was to be ruthelessly nerdy and minimal. These days the goal is to provide a sensible and simple UI and UX without sacrificing on aesthetics.

• 1st iteration in wayback machine.
• 2nd iteration in wayback machine.
• 3rd iteration in wayback machine.
• Current iteration.

Evolution of Brahma until v0.6.x series

Changelogs

v1.0.x

As far as Brahma as an api is concerned (as per semver), Brahma should be considered stable. In the last ~4ish years, Brahma has served ~13k visitors atleast. There is more to come. But polishing is given more priority with respect to the code I have to write. And the focus now is to write more.

v0.9.x

v0.9.x was created with v1.0 as an end goal in mind. I have implemented series taxonomy and list pages for both series and tags. This was a long time request from ArkArjun. A lot of code cleanup was done with respect to logic and general syntax/indentation improvements etc.

v0.8.x

While v0.6.x series was a rewrite of Brahma with Tailwind CSS and v0.7.x an improvement on top of it, the v0.8.x series comes with an intention of improving UI and UX which is the direction I started with v0.7.x series. The v0.8.x series introduces a new portfolio template for home page. This means Brahma have 2 home pages including the polished text only home page which is used on https://arkives.in/. The portfolio home page is in it’s infancy and incomplete. The end goal is to split the home page into components which can be configured by the website owner with just the configuration file and replicate the same with other sections.

Portfolio home page for Brahma v0.8.x

Polished and improved text only home page in Brahma v0.8.x series as seen in https://arkives.in/

v0.7.x series

With v0.6.x, Brahma have complete feature parity with the Bulma CSS implementation of the theme. v0.7.x series tries to improve on it. I started my blog with the radical idea of making my website minimal and nerdy by design. But with v0.7.x, I hope to improve UI/UX with an intention of keeping it simple as well instead of just being minimal. This include better space utilisation with pinned posts and latest post aligned column-wise. And many more improvements on the blog post template among other changes.

Home page for Brahma v0.7.x

Is Brahma open source?

No. Not yet.