zεlpst is my personal website/blog at http://zelp.st and http://zelpst.de. The site is running Kirby, a file-based CMS.

OCTAVO is a theme for the Kirby CMS, originally inspired by a blog post by Clive Thompson, Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens.

Right now, OCTAVO is hardly more than an experiment. Consider it to be still in Alpha. Use at your own risk.

To generate the title style without resorting to images, the default template of OCTAVO relies on Markdown Extra and currently uses these separate fields:

• title_styled: title in Markdown format; make each line h1, i.e. begin each with a #, and set each lines style by adding one of the specific CSS classes (see below) in Markdown Extra, e.g. {.em}
• subtitle: to achieve the look of my posts, make it a blockquote using the Blockquote tag
• city, borrow, author: for the book “imprint” in the format “[city]: Printed for [author], in [borrow]”
• year_romanized: well, I know… (see below)
• replace the “License” below with a Creative Commons one

• em: HUGE widely spaced letters (SHEETS and STYLE in the screenshot above)
• xs: small widely spaced letters (e.g. “by way of” in screenshot)
• spaced: as regular header text size with added space between characters

This was a pretty quick hack in a way, so there are a lot of things I would like to improve or fix even without you having to tell me. Do still tell me though if you have ideas or think these ones here are bad:

• create year_romanized programmatically from publishing date field
• maybe not call it subtitle and always make it a blockquote?
• put all theme-specific fields in one octavo YAML field (purpose: make clear this is theme-specific data, both in content markup and template code, possibly allowing to identify which theme CSS to use when having multi-theme blog (see next idea)
• idea: as it will be hard to impossible to only come up with articles that match this very specific, historic design, I think of ways to give myself a way to easily tell Kirby to use a specific theme for specific blog posts; first step will be to name all theme-specific files accordingly unique, then create a “theme-agnostic” homepage
• fix layout issues on devices with very small width

You are free to use, learn from, improve my own changes and additions to the Kirby CMS basis which make my blog personal. Where applicable, I include license informations in comments within the source code.

You are not, however, allowed to use the entirety of the code, i.e. the Kirby platfiorm, to run your own blog without acquiring a Kirby license first!

Please refer to the Kirby website, the original Readme kirby.md and of course license.md for informations about using and licensing Kirby CMS.