I created a custom theme for my Happiness Course ☀️

[mirokosut]

Hello Creators

I have created a custom theme for my Happiness Course with simple Bento Grids.

Feeling Happy Just Got Easy

I have studied computer engineering and happiness science (what a combo! ) and enjoy combining these worlds.

During our travel to Japan, I noticed the beauty of the perfectly organized breakfast and sushi boxes (which I think is called Bento Box). Later I dicovered, that so-called Bento Grids are popular in web design, for instance, by Apple.

Every tile in this grid is implemented as a Ghost “partial” to ensure consistency among the website. These tiles can be customized by predefined partial parameters, such as tagline, title, description, background, href, top/center/bottom image, and even allow custom code (as a parameter) to be injected for custom content.

The stacking of these grids is achieved by flexbox. It is stupidly simple because the tiles are mapped to a simple grid. Tiles do not have to be reordered when changing the screen size. #lazy

My guideline was the quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

His words also applied to the content: My online happiness course is like “Blinkist for Happiness”—synthesizing happiness science into bite-sized lessons.

Please check the website to see if it makes you happy!

I would appreciate your feedback and critiques.

By the way, the course is FREE for the first 1000 members.

Free

PS: Sorry for the rookie illustrations, this project is a one-man show.

[Cathy_Sarisky]

Adorable! :) (And some extra words because they’re required!)

[alexhulme]

Looks amazing man, good job! Just signed up!

[denvergeeks]

Very nice, @mirokosut! The site makes me happy just looking at it

What are you using for AI-Narrated mp3 functionality, as on the Routines post?

[mirokosut]

Thank you for your nice words, @denvergeeks!

I am using OpenAI Text to Speech (TTS), and the voice is called Echo:
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech

In the past months, I have tested many tools, and OpenAI sounds most natural. Many I have tried sounded ridiculous.

Every time I adjust the content, a workflow in Make.com gets triggered, pulls the HTML from the post, strips away irrelevant parts such as images, converts the remaining HTML code to Markup, and sends it as input to OpenAI TTS, which in turn saves it to an organized Dropbox folder (where all narrations are saved).

Then I need to download the mp3 chunks (there are more per post because of TTS character limit per execution), merge them, and manually re-upload the combined mp3 file to the post.

[denvergeeks]

Thank you for that very useful information! Thank you for sharing positivity and best wishes for your delightful website!

[Max_Huang]

@mirokosut

Free

Hello Mirokosut,

I’m absolutely blown away by your Ghost theme—it’s incredible! I’m really eager to learn how to create something similar on my own. Is there a way for me to learn from you, or perhaps do you have a template available for purchase?

[alexnguyen]

A very nice website: clean, well-organized, concise text, informative and attention-to-details with podcasts.

Spark some ideas in my mind…

I feel happy already. :D

Congratulation. I hope it gets good traffic.

[Shalone_Cason]

I like the design a lot. It is beautiful and simple. One nit-pick, you should have a link to the next lesson or related lessons below the lesson post so users don’t have to go back to go forward (if that sentence makes sense).

I love the illustrations and colors. It’s a very welcoming site. And I’m sure many Ghost users would like to be able to purchase and use this theme (I’m one of those people ).

[mirokosut]

Hello Everyone,

Thank you very much for your kind words. They mean a lot to me.

To show my appreciation, I have decided to make the theme available to the public soon. In the following weeks, I will abstract the theme and make it general-purpose and customizable with custom settings without you ever having to fiddle with the code.

It will support Ghost native memberships, posts, tags, authors, search, comments, and some useful integrations of privacy policies, cookie banners, and the GDPR consent database (consent proofs).

Is there anything you want to see that you have not seen yet? I am all ears!

I look forward to sharing the theme with you soon (at an affordable price).

PS: If you wish to be notified when it gets released, simply leave a comment here and I will send you a direct message…

Kind Regards
Miro

[mirokosut]

UPDATES

The theme will be released to the public in two to three weeks.

You can now join the waitlist here:

Bento Theme

The work is in progress and is unstoppable.

[alexnguyen]

I understand this theme is currently for 1 lesson, so the homepage is basically the “lesson detail / intro page”, and then the “. / lessons” is for subscribers.

I would suggest / Is it possible, to make this a multi-lesson theme, where homepage would feature all lessons, and then we can go to Happiness / Mental / Grateful… Lessons.

I’ve been thinking about multiple subscriptions where one can choose to subscribe to each lesson.

Just my idea…

[mirokosut]

It has been a while, and I owe you a short update as the Bento Ghost Theme is a few days behind schedule.

The hard work has been done.

The theme has been completely rewritten and has become a general-purpose theme. These days I am writing the official documentation to help you adjust it to your unique needs.

Demo is online.

I expect the theme to be released by the beginning of the next week.

Thank you for all your kind feedback, which motivated me to publish the theme publicly!

You will hear from me in a few days.