Bleda is a blog starter theme for Gridsome that generates a static, SEO-ready blog with Tailwind CSS styling, paginated archives, and taxonomies for tags and authors.
What is Bleda?
Bleda is an open-source blog starter built for Gridsome, the Vue-powered static site generator. It takes Markdown content as input and produces a fully static blog with pages for individual posts, tag archives, author archives, and paginated index pages. The theme's design is inspired by the Attila Ghost theme, and its styling is implemented entirely with Tailwind CSS. The project is maintained by cossssmin on GitHub.
Key Features
- Sitemap and RSS feed — Automatically generates an XML sitemap and an RSS feed for the blog, aiding search engine indexing and content syndication.
- Google Analytics — Includes built-in support for Google Analytics, letting you add your tracking ID without extra code.
- Custom 404 page — Ships with a styled 404 error page that matches the blog's layout.
- Open Graph meta tags — Adds Open Graph metadata so shared links display rich previews on social media.
- Code syntax highlighting — Provides syntax highlighting for code blocks, useful for technical tutorials.
- Parallax and fullscreen cover images — Supports parallax post covers plus an option to display covers in fullscreen mode.
- Medium-like image lightbox — Opens images in a lightbox similar to Medium's viewing experience.
- Taxonomies for tags and authors — Organizes content with tag and author archives, each with its own paginated listing.
- Approximate read time — Computes and displays an estimated reading time for each post.
- Post excerpts — Uses automatic excerpts or lets you define a custom excerpt in the post's front matter.
- Paginated archives — Blog, tag, and author archive pages support pagination, as demonstrated in the live demo.
- Locale-aware dates — Formats post dates according to your locale using moment.js.
- Old post warning — Shows a warning on posts older than one year, and the threshold is configurable.
Who is it for?
Bleda suits developers and writers who want a fast, static blog without managing a database or server. It's particularly useful for JAMstack projects and anyone already familiar with Vue or Gridsome.
- Static site developers — Use Bleda as a foundation to build custom blogs, taking advantage of Gridsome's component system and Tailwind's utility classes.
- Technical writers — Publish code-heavy posts with syntax highlighting and an integrated lightbox for screenshots.
- Personal bloggers — Set up a free blog by deploying to Netlify with the one-click button, then publish Markdown files.
Use cases
- Personal tech blogs: Write Markdown posts with code snippets, cover images, and read-time estimates, and get a static site that loads quickly.
- JAMstack portfolios: Showcase your writing by topic using tag archives and highlight articles using author pages.
- Project documentation side-blogs: Run a lightweight blog alongside a project site with built-in RSS and analytics.
FAQ
Is Bleda free to use?
Bleda is an open-source starter theme published on GitHub. You can use, modify, and redistribute it freely under its open-source license.
How do I install Bleda?
Run gridsome create my-website https://github.com/cossssmin/gridsome-starter-bleda.git to scaffold a new site, or clone the repository and run npm install manually.
What content format does Bleda use?
Bleda is designed for Markdown-based blog posts. Each post can include front matter fields for title, date, tags, author, excerpt, and cover image settings.
Can I deploy Bleda to Netlify?
Yes, the repository includes a "Deploy to Netlify" button that connects the GitHub repo directly to Netlify for one-click deployment.
