Aptitude revisited after a decade / 2025 / Notes / Anand Chowdhary

Back in 2014 I shipped Aptitude, a tiny theme to publish a clean one page articles in minutes. Three CSS files, copy the demo, hit deploy, then let the words breathe. The real goal was less build, more writing. A decade later I revisited it to see how small front end choices age… 📄👇

What problem did it solve in 2014? I wanted a readable article or project page fast on GitHub Pages, with no toolchain and nice typography by default. I made it on Aug 8, 2014. Stack was N, Font Awesome 4.1 from MaxCDN, my CSS on RawGit, and Typekit for Adobe Garamond Pro and Calluna Sans. Copy paste typography, simple single page layout, done.

Architecture was zero pipeline. Three external stylesheets in the head and a you could clone. No bundler, no minify step beyond what CDNs gave. In 2025 I would ship https links with SRI and a CSP. RawGit felt magical then. It shut down in 2019 and the links broke, which reminds you just how brittle all of this us.

Clever bits and brittle ones. The accent color lived as #e44249 with a small inline style trick to retheme hover, focus, and blockquote borders. Fast to tweak, easy to miss, and global restyling was fragile. Typekit fonts looked great but added blocking requests and no font display, so FOIT and FOUT were common. I shipped icon fonts for share links, often without text labels. Also, “fa-mail” was not even a real class, which is a very 2014 move. The demo used p then h3 nesting and halves built with floats or inline blocks. Focus styles were mostly cosmetic. I was not me in 2016 for sure!

2014 defaults vs 2025 practice. Then we trusted third party CDNs, icon fonts, and Typekit. Today I would prefer one self contained HTML file by default, CSS custom properties for theming, SVG icons, visible focus states, aria labels, prefers reduced motion, dark mode tokens, system or variable fonts with font display swap, and Flexbox or Grid. What held up was the no build HTML first ergonomics. What did not was external CDNs by default, icon fonts, hardcoded theming, and fragile markup.

What is the smallest theming surface that survives a decade? How do we keep copy paste easy without outsourcing resilience to CDNs?

Here’s the project: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/aptitude