Introducing vanam-erudite

astro-erudite v2 is a minimal, opinionated blogging template by jktrn. It gives you a blog, projects, an about page, and a sidebar — everything you need to start writing. But I wanted more: a richer homepage, a gallery, comments, and deeper tag integration without adding weight.

So I forked it into vanam-erudite.

What changed

• Flat technical bento homepage — identity strip, latest-post strip, impact highlights, contact CTA, writing and projects lists, photography, and a quiet local time/weather tile. One column on mobile, two columns from 30rem up.
• Gallery system — a full content collection with listing pages, photo lightbox, prev/next navigation, and year-grouped index.
• Blog upgrades — pinned posts and drafts sections on the index, series subposts, build-time backlinks, reading time, and table of contents.
• Giscus comments — GitHub Discussions-backed comments on blog posts, with theme syncing and View Transition support.
• Umami analytics — privacy-first, cookieless, loads only when configured.
• Tags across blog and gallery — unified tag index and detail pages (projects use plain tech labels instead of tags).
• Command palette + shortcuts — Pagefind full-text search in production with a title-index fallback in dev, ? shortcut dialog.
• Weather widget — live data from wttr.in, no API key required, cached with graceful fallback.

Everything follows the same principle as the base template: minimal JavaScript, native CSS, no unnecessary dependencies. Giscus and Umami are optional — the site works fully without them.

Check out the template at vanam-erudite2.vercel.app or the source on GitHub. If you build something with it, I would genuinely like to hear about it.