, 3 min read

Example Theme for Simplified Saaze: Myra West

Simplified Saaze is the static site generator used for this very blog. There are a number of themes for Simplified Saaze:

  1. Saaze example, a pure example theme, simple to use and modify
  2. J-Pilot, showcasing an open-source software project and having a hierarchical menu
  3. Koehntopp, a blog for a computer scientist
  4. NukeKlaus, a blog for an atomic engineer
  5. Mobility, a multilingual site for promoting software for battery management used in electric vehicles
  6. Vonhoff, a German site for a doctoral student
  7. Paternoster, a blog of a web developer
  8. Panorama, a site for a restaurant showing their rooms and their menu
  9. Lemire, a site for a computer science professor
  10. Wendt, a German political blog

Here we present yet another theme called "Myra West".

The theme is for a blog about psychology, friendship, and personal journaling of a female writer with an artistic touch. Therefore it has a pink background, blossoms as a hero image, a kind of artistic font, etc.

In Converting Myra West's vlog to blog I described how I used the YouTube video content to remodel it as a text blog, with some sprinkles of:

1. Key features

Some key features of the theme:

  1. Lightweight
  2. Responsive with media breaks at 40rem and 60rem
  3. The hero image is showing a parallax, see W3 schools example
  4. Static site search using pagefind

The theme uses three Google fonts:

  1. Libre Baskerville for the main body of text
  2. Charm for headlines
  3. Mea Culpa for some artistic feeling in the headlines for the first character

As each blog post is essentially the transcript of an already existing YouTube video, each frontmatter references the YouTube video like this:

---
date: "2019-08-12 12:00:00"
title: "21 Years Old: I Have NO Friends"
youtube: "QfbCMjNj9q8"
---

Installing this theme including Simplified Saaze goes like this:

composer create-project eklausme/saaze-myrawest

The source code is in saaze-myrawest.

2. Building a static blog

Below is the command to build:

$ time php saaze -rb /tmp/build
Building static site in /tmp/build...
        execute(): filePath=./content/blog.yml, nSIentries=22, totalPages=2, entries_per_page=20
Finished creating 1 collections, 1 with index, and 23 entries (0.02 secs / 3.07MB)
#collections=1, parseEntry=0.0005/23-1, md2html=0.0010, toHtml=0.0012/23, renderEntry=0.0016/23, renderCollection=0.0003/3, content=23/0
        real 0.05s
        user 0.02s
        sys 0
        swapped 0
        total space 0

Option -b is entirely superfluous. It specifies the build directory. In our case this is /tmp/build, which happens to be a RAM disk in Arch Linux. If this option is not given then Simplified Saaze stores the static files in the build directory of the current directory.

Option -r generates an RSS feed.

The time command is only used to demonstrate that converting 23 Markdown files to HTML is pretty quick.

3. Templates

I use the following hierarchy of PHP files for my entry-template, i.e., the template for a blog post:

# entry.php ## top-layout.php ### head.php ## Actual content: $entry['content'] ## bottom-layout.php

The following hierarchy is used for the index-template, i.e., the template for showing a reverse-date sorted list of blog posts:

# index.php ## top-layout.php ### head.php ## for-loop over entry-excerpts ## bottom-layout.php