Königspress - new theme inspired by your work
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Hello, as you may recall, a number of weeks ago I wanted to use your theme for one of my blogs - but while trying to hack it, a number of shortcomings in its design became apparent. For one thing, many styles and layouts are not changed in-place but rather redefined in other files which simply override the standard settings - making the entire thing quite intransparent and hard to customize. Also, the font management is not really conducive to proper web-font usage (both character-set and copyright wise).
It seemed less work for me to design a new theme based on the clearer structure of the default octopress theme, than to rewrite your code. This lead to me writing up a rather barebones hack of the default octopress theme which closely resembles Pageturner only in visual appearance.
The theme is called Königspress (drawing on its black-white-ness) and its GitHub page can be found here. I would call the theme an early alpha at this point, as I have not tested many of the features.
Here is a Königspress demo site.
I would be very happy to hear your input on it, and of course, it would be great if you would be interested in merging the projects together, or maybe merging some of the Pageturner features which I may not even have realized existed into Königspress.
Can you explain what you mean by: "Also, the font management is not really conducive to proper web-font usage (both character-set and copyright wise)."
I'm not a front-end dev and would like to better understand what the issue is.
Google Fonts (what the default octopress theme and königspress use) allows users to select fonts with full (or at least extensive) character sets and which can be used without copyright infringement. Deploying fonts completely manually (currently in pageturner) makes the user responsible for both these aspects. Mistakes are easy to make - in fact, most of the default pageturner fonts only have alphanumeric characters and basic punctuation.
Thanks for all your thoughts. Love how you named your theme :)
Using Google Web Fonts is obviously a much better approach, leaving all other aspects aside (regrettably I am not an expert on copyright issues), it at least produces a cleaner and more maintainable result. If I recall correctly, the only reason I decided to take the "add all font source files to the repo" approach was that Nevis, the font used for the title (in my opinion the centerpiece of the design), was not available on Google Web Fonts (but freely downloadable otherwise). Nevis was the closest font in similarity I could find to Brandon Grotesque, the font used in the original website that inspired this theme: http://simonfosterdesign.com/blog/.
If anybody could point me to the right direction as to which approach to take to make sure everything is okay copyrights-wise if I want to still use Nevis, I would be happy to make the changes and use Google Web Fonts where possible.
I also agree that the SASS files are by far not as easily customisable as they could be. Pageturner was my first and only attempt at building an Octopress theme, and in order to avoid having to figure out all the tricky bits myself, I used a different theme as a basis (seen on http://ethan.herokuapp.com/, but the source is sadly not available anymore on GitHub as far as I can tell). I am open to any pull requests that improve this.
I can see that you've included Disqus - cool!
What do you have in mind when you say you want to merge the projects? How did you want to go about doing this?
I'm glad you like it! and yes, I understand your concern about the limited number of fonts in Google Fonts. I also agree that your title font still looks better than mine (or any other font I could find in Google Fonts). I am no lawyer, but copyright-wise each author has his own preferences and usually distributes his own instructions. Meaning that unless you want to dig up the actual license from the original author for every interesting font you find on the internet, you should use Google Fonts where all the responsibility for redistributing the font file falls with Google.
As far as I can tell Nevis should not (or only with explicit credit to the author) be distributed as a font file (as you are doing via pageturner). But it's been 2 months since I looked up its license. I may be wrong.
Regarding any merge possibilities, I was thinking you could have a look at what I did and tell me which of the things which are important to you in Pageturner are still missing. Nevis would be one - and I (or you) could include that alongside the Google web fonts in Königspress as well... though I would rather look for another font which includes more unicode characters. Aditionally we could render our own extended charset Grotesque-like font. Though atm I am in another country and do not have my calligraphy tools with me. You seem like an artsy girl - have you ever created a font? would you be interested in giving it a try?