Blog on Northlight

Measuring Contrast Instead of Guessing

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The design reference for this theme carried contrast ratios for every accent colour, worked out by hand from the sRGB values. When they were finally measured against the surfaces they actually sit on, several were wrong — and the ones that were wrong were the ones nobody would have questioned.

Shipping a Static Site Without a Node Toolchain

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The usual static-site build has a Node step in it, and the Node step is where most of the breakage lives. Hugo’s own pipeline covers enough that a content site does not need one.

A Post With Two Authors

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post is credited to two people. Its byline names both, each linking to an author page listing what they wrote, and the card at the foot carries the fuller version with headlines and links.

Setting Long-Form Text for the Screen

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A page of body copy is mostly one decision repeated: how far the eye travels before it has to find the next line. Everything else in a reading layout is downstream of that.

Thumb and background hero

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post exists to render heroStyle = "thumbAndBackground". Every other post on this site uses the default, basic.

Its cover has no text in it, and that is the point. The covers elsewhere on this site have their title baked into the artwork, which is the right choice for a card but the wrong one here: an overlay treatment would then show the title twice. Artwork for these styles should carry no words.

Background hero

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post exists to render heroStyle = "background". Every other post on this site uses the default, basic.

Everything the Theme Has to Render

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post exists to exercise every element the theme renders. Keep it in sync with the build plan: when you add a feature, add the markup that proves it works.

Why This Theme Has No Shortcodes

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The theme Northlight replaces ships about forty-five shortcodes. An audit of every post on the site using it found that exactly zero appeared in any of them.

Unused surface is not free#

Every shortcode is a template to maintain, a name to document, and a behaviour someone will eventually depend on. Shipping forty-five of them to cover the handful a given site might want is a trade that only looks good before the maintenance starts.

A Link Post Pointing Elsewhere

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This body is never reached from a listing, because every card and index row for this post links to externalUrl instead. The page still builds, so an existing permalink does not break.

Two Modes, Not One Inverted

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inverting a palette is the cheapest way to get a dark mode and the easiest one to spot. Pure white text on pure black vibrates; mid greys that read as calm on white read as murky on black; and a saturated accent that was comfortable at 6:1 becomes a glare at 15:1.

A Post With No Description

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post deliberately has no description in its front matter, which is what makes it useful: it is the one entry in the index that exercises list.showSummary. With that setting off, the listing shows the title and nothing else. With it on, the text you are reading now is stripped of its markup, truncated, and used as the excerpt instead.