Bootstrap: CSS made simple
From time to time it happens that I've to realize a quick and dirty website (for my kids' school, a friend, a research group I collaborate with).
Everytime I spend some time researching the right tool and, being a programmer and not a designer, I'm especially frightened by HTML and CSS – the "backend" (or business logic) is almost never an issue: I (not so) recently fell in love with Python and the wonderful Flask that are much more than enough for the simple logic I need to add to such sites.
In the last few months I've done some experiments with:
- HTML5 Reset, I've used for the Aladdin lab,
- 52framework, I was tempted to use for this site (as in their demo),
- HTML 5 Boilerplate and Initializr I got fashinated with, but never had enough time to actually dig into.
When a few days ago I stated the No Fuss Bookmarks project (to scratch a personal itch with the now very fussy Delicious, as I'll describe in a forthcoming post), I stumbled upon the awsome Bootstrap toolkit from Twitter.
Better than a dream come true, I was able to design the (albeit very basic) interface of "No Fuss Bookmarks" in few hours and without particular effort, obtaining nonetheless a pleasant and modern aspect – you should see how my HTML usually looks…
Given what I considered quite a success for my designer (in)abilities, I decided to embark in something I had in mind since a long time ago: change the stile of this blog to differentiate it from the defalut look and feel of Pelican
It took me no more than six hours to get to the point I was satisfied enough to re-publish the blog with the new style (that you see here) and to decide to give back to the open source community by making the theme public on GitHub, where Alexis Metaireau (the author of Pelican) was so kind to immediately accept my fork request.