Announcing Three New Free JAMstack Blogging Themes
I've spent the last few weeks working on three new free themes for IndieWeb blogging: Indiepaper, Newsprint, and brennan.jp.net, all of which centre around giving people a place to call their own on the internet.
sk anybody on the IndieWeb what they think about blogging, and you'll most likely get a rather passionate, long-winded answer. [I'm no different](https://blog.brennan.day/the-dying-art-of-having-something-to-say-68f4e77d09fc0). I started getting into web development over a decade ago with Jekyll and the announcement of Ghost when I was still in high school.
As the years have gone by, I've stayed in this cozy, somewhat obscure niche of [JAMstack development](https://jamstack.org/), making static site themes and projects that are open source and free for others to use however they like. This is exactly why I founded [🍓 Berry House](https://berryhouse.ca) in the first place, because I believe having your own website is just getting more and important and useful in today's age of corpo-AI slopfests.
After I received a donation yesterday from the lovely [BinaryDigit](https://binarydigit.dev/), crediting me for the 11ty theme I made previously called [RetroWeird](https://github.com/brennanbrown/retroweird), I realized I needed to get back into making blog themes.
As fun as RetroWeird is visually, I can't imagine it would actually be easy to use as a blog theme, I would imagine there would be a lot of wrestling with it. ([Hyperpop](https://github.com/brennanbrown/hyperpop) is also a fun theme I made as well, but it has similar problems.) And even though it's only been a few months since I've made these themes, I've already learned a lot since then. Sometimes, like actual property, it is easier to start from scratch than try to do renovations.
I needed to return to form. Start from scratch and take what I've learned over the past few months and make the best possible themes I could for people that want to get onto the IndieWeb.
With these themes, or any themes for Hugo, 11ty, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. All you need is a git repository, whether on GitLab or Codeberg or elsewhere, hook it up to a service like Netlify or Vercel, and you have your own blog for free. The only thing that'll cost is a domain name. No databases, no monthly fees, no limitations to customization. You write your blog posts in plain-text markdown files however you like, and that's it.
With all that out of the way, let's actually get to the themes!
## 📰 Indiepaper
<figure> <a href="https://indiepaper.netlify.app" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="no-external-icon"> <img src="/assets/images/blog/indiepaper-screenshot.jpg" alt="Indiepaper theme screenshot showing a minimalist brutalist blog design"> </a> <figcaption>Indiepaper theme featuring a simple, brutalist design with smolweb compliance and microformats2 support</figcaption> </figure>
**Platform:** Hugo **Philosophy:** Smolweb compliance meets brutalist design **Repository:** [github.com/brennanbrown/indiepaper](https
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