A blog template that's finished on day one.

Nova is the blog template we wished existed every time a client said “we just want a fast, good-looking blog.” Most free templates look free. The polished ones cost as much as a nice dinner for four and still ship with a CMS you don't need. So we built Nova the way we build client sites at Pixel & Oak — static-first, obsessively fast, typography-led — and gave it away.

Everything is markdown. Drop a .md file into content/posts, give it a title, date, excerpt and a few tags, and the build does the rest: the article pages, the tag filters, the reading times, the RSS feed, the sitemap, even the cover art — those gradients are generated from each post's tags, so the site looks finished without a single stock photo.

The whole thing exports to plain HTML with next build. No server, no database, no cold starts. Host it free on Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify or GitHub Pages, and it will score green on Core Web Vitals out of the box — because there's almost nothing to load.

Making it yours

  • Name and links. Edit lib/site.ts — site title, description, URL, author and social handles all live in one file.
  • Accent color. Nova uses indigo. Search-and-replace indigo- with any Tailwind color — sky, emerald, rose — and the whole theme follows, aurora included.
  • Writing. One markdown file per post in content/posts. The README documents every frontmatter field.
  • Newsletter. The signup card is provider-agnostic — point the form at Buttondown, Kit, Mailchimp or your own endpoint.

The full customization guide lives in the README. If you build something with Nova, we'd genuinely love to see it.