The Interesting Times is a free, MIT-licensed Jekyll theme with a newspaper-style design, created by Alvaro Duran for blogs and news sites.
What is The Interesting Times?
The Interesting Times is a Jekyll theme designed to present content in a newspaper format. It is a static-site theme that runs on Jekyll, the Ruby-based static site generator, and is targeted at GitHub Pages, so it can be hosted for free from a GitHub repository. The theme is free to use under the MIT license, and the project is maintained by Alvaro Duran with a public repository on GitHub.
Key Features
- Newspaper presentation — The theme is explicitly categorized as a newspaper-theme, giving sites a print-editorial look for headlines, articles, and sections.
- GitHub Pages integration — The repository lists github-pages as a topic, meaning the theme is set up to deploy directly to GitHub Pages without extra configuration.
- MIT license — Free for personal and commercial use, with permission to modify and redistribute the source.
- Live demo — A preview is hosted at ohduran.github.io/the-interesting-times, showing the exact look and behavior of the theme.
- One-click download — The entire theme is downloadable as a ZIP archive from the master branch of the repository.
- Open contribution process — The README outlines a fork-and-pull-request workflow for adding features or fixing issues.
Who is it for?
- Journalists and writers — who want a striking, editorial layout for their personal blogs or article collections.
- Online publishers — who need a lightweight, static news website that is fast to load and cheap to host.
- Jekyll developers — who want a ready-made theme to reverse-engineer, customize, or contribute back to via GitHub.
What can you do with it?
- News bloggers: publish Markdown-based posts and have them rendered in a newspaper-style layout with Jekyll's static build.
- GitHub Pages users: deploy the theme directly to your GitHub Pages site by forking the repository and editing the files.
- Open-source contributors: fork the repo, create a feature branch, and submit a pull request to improve the theme.
FAQ
Is The Interesting Times free?
Yes. It is released under the MIT license, which allows free use, modification, and distribution, including commercial projects.
Does The Interesting Times work with GitHub Pages?
The theme is tagged with the github-pages topic, and the live demo runs on GitHub Pages, so it is intended to work with that platform out of the box.
How can I install The Interesting Times?
You can download the ZIP from the repository's master branch, fork the repository on GitHub, or clone it locally. Since it is a Jekyll theme, you can also inspect the included layouts and includes to adapt it to your own Jekyll site.
Who made The Interesting Times?
The theme was designed and developed by Alvaro Duran, as stated in the README copyright section, and he welcomes community contributions through pull requests.
