oinam-jekyll VS simple.css

As we are on HN, I'm going to assume that you are comfortable using Github and can follow instructions.

Write it on Github and publish on your domain. Github has an option for you to fire up a web-editor (VSCode) right there in the browser with the keyboard `.` (<- that is a period). So, you can write right then and there (I do it quite often these days).

When publishing, choose a Jekyll theme of your choice from Github Pages[1]. Your focus now are just enough plain text (Markdown).

If you want to bring it to your desktop/device, just checkout the repo and write. These days, my choice is to just write in Obsidian and don't even try to run Jekyll.

What do you get out of this? The simplicity of focusing on your writing with almost Plain Text while Github takes care of your theme, hosting, SSL, and custom domain[2].

Of course, you will need to book a domain and own it. I like Cloudflare[3] that takes care of pretty much everything you want to do with a domain for free. If you so wish, you can even let Cloudflare do the page building[4] and hosting while you keep Github for the source.

Plug: I build a super simple Jekyll theme[5] just so I can do this. I wrote an article about it on my website[6].

1. https://pages.github.com

2. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/configuring-a-custom-domain...

3. https://www.cloudflare.com

4. https://pages.cloudflare.com

5. https://oinam.github.io/oinam-jekyll/

6. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

Simple.css is a well done classless 'framework'. I stumbled on it a while back and started using it and thought this can be my go-to styles for tit-bits of websites that I do for landing pages, family websites etc. However, this is pretty opinionated (including some animations) and I had to abandon it. But I remained inspired by its simplicity and forked my own[1] broke it down. I broke it down to the most basic, but then can be built on top of it -- progressively get a website "designed" far enough but not further.

If you are into these simple classes, check out Drop-in Minimal CSS[2] and choose the one that fits your need.

Simple.css is from an interesting guy, Kev Quirk[3], whose 512kb[4] website was on Hackernews a while back (don't recollect if it was a story or a comment). Hi Kev, if you are around.

If you are spinning up a simple website with classless styles, perhaps it is a good idea to add a print styles and I like Gutenberg[5] for that.

1. https://oinam.github.io/oinam-jekyll/

2. https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/

3. https://kevq.uk/about/

4. https://512kb.club

5. https://github.com/BafS/Gutenberg

Ah! This is brilliant. There are quite a few comments here about pitching this against other CSS frameworks or the actual use of this.

This is not a stand-alone framework or anything of that start. Treat as one of your scaffold components for your styling framework. Tailwind does this with their tailwind.config.js and is more of raw CSS design tokens. I just wish their commercial TailWindUI[1] make it easy to make use of it the better way.

I wish I saw Pollen a few months ago. I wanted to do an effortless design for my personal website and stick to as plain vanilla CSS as possible. The best way was to rely on CSS-Variables. I did do it from scratch[2]. It works though it is pretty hacky, and I'm not too concerned. Right now, I can swap few values and have an entirely different color scheme - light/dark version of my own, Nord Theme[3], and I will keep adding me whenever I get bored. I can even tweak the rhythms and spacing to my liking with just the variable. You should check out the demo[4] or look at the source[5] (wip).

For those who find this interesting, you should check out another interesting one I discovered a few months back -- css-media-vars[6].

1. https://tailwindui.com

2. https://github.com/oinam/oinam-jekyll/blob/main/_includes/cs...

3. https://www.nordtheme.com

4. https://oinam.github.io/oinam-jekyll/

5. https://github.com/oinam/oinam-jekyll

6. https://github.com/propjockey/css-media-vars

Agreed, find a class-less framework to start, so that you focus on just the HTML, semantic structure first. Here's a couple of lists of such frameworks:

https://github.com/troxler/awesome-css-frameworks#class-less

https://github.com/dohliam/dropin-minimal-css

Personally, I like simple.css (https://github.com/kevquirk/simple.css)

Creator of Simple.css here.

Thanks for all the feedback and comments here, folks. It really is appreciated.

I’m not a professional web designer - this just started off as a personal project that I ended up publishing as people I shared it with seemed to like it.

I’m taking on board the various feedback from people much more knowledgeable than I here, again I really appreciate it.

If you do have feedback/changes I’d urge you to log an Issue or a PR on Github[1].

Also great to see so many other minimal CSS projects that I wasn't aware of. I’ll have to add an alternatives page to the site, I think.

[1] https://github.com/kevquirk/simple.css

Simple.css includes the basics to get going at the moment, but I intend to add more to it as time goes on. If you want to contribute, please feel free to submit a pull request. Contributing guidelines can be found here.