Smigle Lite
A stripped-down Hugo theme fork based on Smigle.
Problem
The original Smigle theme was a good fit for a plain writing site, but it carried features this site did not need. Reading time, word counts, profile imagery, and heavier metadata made the theme feel busier than the writing called for.
Approach
Smigle Lite started as a focused fork that removed unnecessary surface area and kept the useful parts: simple pages, readable typography, no tracking, no runtime external dependencies, and no JavaScript by default. Later updates added bundled JetBrains Mono, better prose and code styling, optional table of contents, optional static search, shortcodes, active navigation, and SEO metadata.
The important constraint was to add support without changing the theme into a product shell. The theme still behaves like a small static site theme first.
Result
Smigle Lite became a cleaner, more maintainable base for a reading-first Hugo site. It also acted as the stepping stone toward Termfolio: many of the lessons about privacy, local assets, metadata, search, and restrained navigation carried forward.