Moving away from Twitter Bootstrap - Hello new design!

April 03 2012 • 1 min read

cssjekyllweb

This post was originally published on blog.omgmog.net in 2012, back when I was using Octopress. Recovered from a local backup.

blog.omgmog.net

I decided it was time that I gave some attention to the design of my Jekyll-powered blog. I’ve been using a slightly modified version of the default Twitter Bootstrap theme since I moved to Jekyll, and that’s just not good enough.

I’ve created the new theme from scratch, and I’ve thrown in some PJAX wizardry to make page-loading fancier. Gone are the old post-banners, and thumbnails (which to be honest I was adding just to make things look a bit less-boring), say hello to the new, larger hero banner for the latest post!

You might notice some fancy effects on the homepage when you scroll, this is accomplished with a bit of jQuery and css3 to scale the title while parallaxing the hero banner.

I’ve also made a forray in to a responsive layout, so if you’re viewing this on a screen smaller than 960px wide you will see some slight differences. But it’s not that different.

Obviously the fancy stuff is dependant on your browser, but it should atleast look nice for anybody using Internet Explorer.

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k2thero commented May 10, 2012

I’d be interested in hearing what was lacking for you in Bootstrap?

Max Glenister commented May 10, 2012

Twitter Bootstrap simply had too much stuff for my needs. Besides that, too many people are using the Twitter Bootstrap style, so I felt as if my blog looked too much like some packaged blog.Creating a new theme for Jekyll from scratch is rewarding, I know exactly what’s what and what the site can do, and it allows me to integrate things as I like.

Thanks for the background! I’ve been thinking of pulling in some of their less styles for buttons and button groups, but I agree that going 100% bootstrap can result in a pretty “me too” look.

Max Glenister