I decided to change the theme on this website for a couple of reasons; 1) I was bored with the other one and ready for a change and 2) the other theme was relatively cluttered:
The new theme is all about the content. It’s a no-frills, light-weight, super-fast implementation of a static website structured as a blog.
I started with the Kiko theme for Jekyll and implemented the few things from the old site that I wanted to retain, such as the footnote function*. If you hover your pointer over that asterisk, you’ll see a pop-up with supplemental information. I also kept the tagging feature for posts and I implemented a plugin that leverages BibTeX. Beyond that, the site is all about cleanly and quickly presenting static content.
The difference in the pages rendered by the two themes is significant: the previous theme’s index page has over 600 lines of HTML while this one has fewer than 50. Clean and fast!