I’m a huge fan of Hugo - not only as a Gopher but because I feel quite comfortable working with it - even though I work full-time as a backend developer and I’ve got no working experience with frontend - just some basic html/css/js. After deciding to start a blog, I searched for the simplest theme possible and decided to go with Hemingway. Unfortunately, Tanksuzuki, the developer of Hemingway, abandoned the theme and doesn’t respond to issues and pull requests for nearly a year, even though he’s being active on Github. I did plenty of changes on this theme and decided to share it with the community.
Theme source (GitHub)
If you are searching for a simple theme for your personal blog (powered by Hugo), Kiss is probably the simplest one out there. There are no pages, only a homepage containing your posts and the posts itself. Personally, I prefer having a blog with no about or similar sections.
Things changed from Hemingway:
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Fixed missing HTML tags
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Tags support (thanks, jiulongw)
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Support for OpenGraph and Twitter social cards (enableSocial parameter in config.toml)
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Support for aligning images (left, right, center)
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Adsense support (top/bottom of article, with per-article settings)
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Easier setup of social icons (no need to set icon property)
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Custom.css support
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Improved SEO (missing Title on homepage, robots.txt support, faster load times)
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Removed Higlhight.js dependency. Since v0.28, Hugo has support for highlighting code without 3rd part libraries (thanks to Chroma project).
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Removed FontAwesome dependency. Replaced with Feather icons
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Thanks to this, the overall footprint of the theme was reduced from ~150kb to ~17kb
Lots of changes were inspired by Munif Tanjim’s Minimo theme.
There are plenty of things I plan to ‘slowly’ implement in Kiss, like AMP support.
The next step will be moving this blog from Hemingway to Kiss.