Alpha Dust

Alpha Dust is a futuristic, glowy Hexo blog theme built with Bootstrap 4, Stylus, and ejs templates, originally developed from scratch by Jonathan Klughertz for personal use and released under the MIT license.

What is Alpha Dust?

Alpha Dust is a responsive Hexo blog theme that gives a glowy, futuristic look to static blogs. It takes standard Hexo posts and pages as input and renders them into a full blog with an archive page, tags and categories support, pagination, and a footer with social links. The theme runs on the Hexo static site generator and is configured entirely through YAML files: the blog's main _config.yml selects the theme, while the theme's own _config.yml controls the menu, logo, footer text, comments, analytics, and social URLs.

Key Features

• Responsive design — The layout adapts to mobile and desktop viewports using Bootstrap 4 Alpha as the CSS framework.
• Disqus comments — Set your Disqus shortname in the theme config to add comment threads to posts.
• Google Analytics — Add your tracking ID in the theme's _config.yml to enable analytics.
• Tag and category pages — Create dedicated indexes by making a page with type: "tags" or type: "categories" in front matter and adding it to the menu.
• Responsive images and video — Images scale on small screens, and YouTube/Vimeo embeds are made responsive.
• Image gallery — Uses FeatherLight.js to display lightbox galleries inside posts.
• Social accounts — Configure Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Dribbble, GitHub, Google Plus, Behance, 500px, email, and RSS links in the footer; no link means no icon.
• Pagination and pages — Built-in support for paginated archives and static pages like About.

The theme is built with ejs for HTML templates, Stylus for CSS preprocessing, and relies on jQuery, GSAP, and Font Awesome (updated to 4.7.0 in this fork) for animations and icons.

Who is it for?

• Hobbyist bloggers who want a distinctive sci-fi aesthetic without writing custom CSS or JavaScript.
• Hexo users who need a theme with common blog machinery — Disqus, Google Analytics, tags, categories, pagination — preconfigured.
• Developers who want a readable, MIT-licensed theme to fork and customize; the source is available on GitHub and issues are tracked there.

What can you do with Alpha Dust?

• Personal bloggers: publish posts with custom per-post logo icons set in front matter (e.g. logoIcon: fa-pencil-square) to visually distinguish entries.
• Portfolio owners: use the responsive gallery and social footer links to showcase images and link to Behance, Dribbble, or 500px profiles.
• Tech writers: set up an archive page with a custom date format (archive_date_format: MMM YYYY) to organize tutorials by month.

How does Alpha Dust work?

1. Clone the theme into the themes/alpha-dust folder of your Hexo site with git clone https://github.com/klugjo/hexo-theme-alpha-dust themes/alpha-dust.
2. Set theme: alpha-dust in your blog's main _config.yml.
3. Edit the theme's _config.yml to set the menu, Font Awesome logo class, footer text, default post title, archive date format, Disqus shortname, Google Analytics ID, and social URLs.
4. For tags or categories pages, run hexo new page "tags" (or categories), set the page type in front matter, and add it to the menu.

Pricing

Alpha Dust is free and open source under the MIT license. There are no paid tiers or license fees.

FAQ

Is Alpha Dust free?

Yes. The theme is released under the MIT license, so you can use, modify, and redistribute it freely, including in commercial projects.

How do I install Alpha Dust?

Install it by cloning the repository into your Hexo themes directory and setting theme: alpha-dust in your blog's main _config.yml. Full installation and configuration steps are in the theme's readme.

Does Alpha Dust support comments and analytics?

Yes. Alpha Dust supports Disqus comments via a disqus_shortname setting and Google Analytics via a tracking ID setting, both configured in the theme's _config.yml.