Ascent

An opinionated Hexo theme for blogs with long blocks of text. Demo.

It's best suited for blogs with a lot of longform writing, and it's designed to give the reader as smooth of a reading experience as possible. I wrote Ascent because it seemed that none of the Hexo themes available had this aim; unlike most Hexo themes, the focus of Ascent is to make posts that read like magazine articles or newspaper features.

Read more about Ascent design on the demo. See how Ascent formats Markdown on the demo.

Installation

npm install -g hexo-cli
hexo init <site>
cd <site>
git clone https://github.com/cjquines/hexo-theme-ascent themes/ascent

Then set your theme in _config.yml to ascent.

Configuration

Here's what can be changed in themes/ascent/_config.yml:

menu. Header links can be customized by adding more keys inside menu:

menu:
  Home: /
  Archives: /archives
  Github: https://github.com/cjquines

rss. Link to the generated RSS. You need to have hexo-generator-feed installed, which you can do with npm install hexo-generator-feed.
excerpt_link. The text of the "read more" link in the home page.
favicon. Path to the favicon.
settings. Toggles whether the settings (sans-serif/serif, light/dark) appear in the lower-right corner of the screen.
highlight. Toggles whether code blocks are styled. Changing this to false improves performance by a little bit.
word_count. Toggles whether word counts appear before a post, and in the archives. You need to have hexo-wordount installed, which you can do with npm install hexo-wordcount.
google_analytics. The enable key toggles whether Google Analytics is turned on. Replace UA-000000000-0 with your Google Analytics tracking ID, which you can find in the Google Analytics code.
intensedebate. The enable key toggles whether IntenseDebate comments are turned on. Replace 00000000000000000000000000000000 with the IntenseDebate site account, which you can find in Settings > Account > Site Key.