
(Image by Raiba-art)
Introduction
I’d like to introduce Ghastly, a clean and minimal, lightweight theme for the Pelican blogging platform.
Ghastly is based heavily off of Casper, the default theme for Ghost.
It’s name is derived from the D&D monster, the Ghast and Gastly, the Pokémon.
Features
- Disqus
- Pygments
- CSS & JS minifying using webassets
- Share buttons
- Custom 404 page
Missing Features
- Templates are free from all tracking engines like Google Analytics, although adding tracking is as simple as editing the HTML.
Design concessions
The Casper theme is designed purely for blog posts and as such it is hard to easily create any kind of menu for it without ruining the overall design.
I continued this with Ghastly because to me, the articles are more important than a menu.
This does mean pages become quite pointless.
Typography

(Image by the guys at Carrois, creators of FiraSans)
The guys at Carrois created FiraSans for Mozilla and released it to the world for free.
The Ghastly theme uses both FiraSans for general typography and FiraMono for code, kbd, pre and samp blocks.
This is an example of the FiraSans font
This is an example of FiraMono
Screenshots




Requirements
- pelican
- webassets
- cssmin
- pelican webassets from pelican-plugins
pip install pelican webassets cssmin
Installation
You can find Ghastly on GitHub and you can find installation instructions for themes in the pelican documentation.
Configuration
THEME = 'ghastly'
DIRECT_TEMPLATES = (('index', 'archives', '404'))
License
Ghastly is released under the MIT license.