My Journey with Smigle Lite

So this site’s been up and running for a while now using that theme I cobbled together - you know, my fork of Smigle. Don’t get me wrong, I really dug the original Smigle theme, but it wasn’t quite scratching my particular itch. I loved its stripped-back, 90s web vibe, but there were features I didn’t need and others I desperately wanted. Classic developer story, right? “I’ll just fork it and make a few tweaks…” If you’re curious, you can grab the latest version of my fork on GitHub.

Stuff I Ditched

Honestly, I didn’t trash that much from the original - just a few things that were bugging me.

First to go was that “read time” and word count nonsense in the post metadata. Who actually cares how long something takes to read except maybe the author? Plus, seeing those metrics would just feed my anxiety and make me feel like I need to write epic-length posts, which isn’t what this blog is about. Let’s face it - it’s mostly just me reading this thing anyway!

I also axed the site subtitle. I mean, I’m not nearly cool enough to have a catchy tagline, so why pretend? The profile picture had to go too - just didn’t vibe with the barebones aesthetic I was shooting for.

Last thing I changed was the tags/categories pages. The original had all these bubble things which felt a bit too… I dunno, Web 2.0? To keep that authentic 90s feel, I went with a plain, flat list. Sometimes simpler really is better.

Cool Stuff I Added

First thing I did was update the footer to properly credit the original Smigle theme. Just seemed like the right thing to do, you know?

Then I made the content license customizable instead of hardcoded. Now you can either hide it entirely or set whatever license type you want with a link.

I also added those next/previous post navigation links at the end of each article. I’ve always liked that feature on text-heavy sites - lets me just keep reading without having to remember where I left off in the post list.

Probably my favorite addition is that configurable section at the bottom showing the latest posts. You can turn it off or show however many recent posts you want (I’ve got mine set to three). And here’s a little detail I’m kinda proud of: if the post you’re currently reading would normally show up in that list, it gets skipped and the next oldest post shows instead. Because showing a link to the post you’re literally reading right now would be pretty dumb, right?