Since me and Rebecka moved to the Swedish mountains in September, we’ve been lucky to see the northern lights dancing on the night sky a couple of times. It’s a marvelous spectacle. Even though the camera software in iOS is pretty aggressive about exaggerating the intensity of the green rays and spirals, the photographs can’t capture the feeling of standing beneath a black sky illuminated by light particles colliding in the upper atmosphere.
Neither can a WordPress theme, but that didn’t stop me from trying. My 30th free theme on the WordPress.org theme directory is called Norrsken – the Swedish word for the northern lights. A more literal translation would be the northern shine, and doesn’t that sound a lot more poetic? Maybe it’s because I’m a Stephen King fan.
You can read more about the features in Norrsken here, and download it for free from WordPress.org.
Norrsken is a simple blog theme with white text on a black background and colorful gradient accents inspired by the colors in the northern lights. If you prefer your blog to have a black text on a white background, there’s an inverted style variation in there as well. The monospace typeface used throughout Norrsken – Geist Mono – contributes to its stark style, while also being highly readable. Geist Mono is loaded as a variable font consisting of a single 53 kilobyte file. Combine that with the small amounts of conditionally loaded CSS and the complete lack of JavaScript, and you get a very fast theme. To be fair, it’s become pretty difficult to make a slow block theme.
The most interesting thing about Norrsken is probably not any of the features in the theme, but rather how fast it was to build. I started building it by forking Twenty Twenty-Four on Friday, February 2. I worked on it a little bit that Saturday and Sunday, and didn’t touch it at all on Monday. The next day, Tuesday, it was ready to be submitted to the directory. In total, I probably spent eight to twelve hours on development. You can track the transformation from Twenty Twenty-Four to Norrsken in the GitHub commit history, if you’re into that sort of thing.
It’s heartening to see how much the experience of creating block themes has improved between every one of these I’ve released. Kudos to all of the people who put in hard work in the Gutenberg repository to keep that momentum going.