On my first few days of finding out steem and steemit existed, I ran to try to create something that could get me acquainted with the basic developer API (Application Programming Interface) of the steem network. I ended-up pushing steemcli up, even though that wasn't really what I'd set to myself to build over those programming sessions.
Initially I thought I'd build a custom themeable version of steemit, to fix what I didn't like in it, by scrapping all Ghost themes and making small modifications to them.
That actually is implemented but buggy; if you want to take it over there're 140+ open-source ghost themes I think are perfectly legal to make available with proper attribution & some scripts to do part of the making them work with steem's content bit (also it's important to prevent XSS, which I'm not sure I'm). I'm not really eager to continue trying to do that, so I'm open-sourcing and announcing a less buggy version of that code-base, which simply is a lean read-only front-end for steemit.com running on heroku's free tier at steembin.herokuapp.com.
Some screenshots:
I just thought it was funny that in the end, the hacky, old-fashioned, unsophisticated way of trying to build a little front-end as a regular web-application without doing a SPA was actually pretty decently for me to navigate, even though it's a crappy script.
Check a webpage test here, comparing steembin on Heroku's free tier against steemit.com's current React.js front-end.
There's a neat little video here as well.
Enjoy or mock the code on GitLab, published under the GPLv3 license. I'll probably give you full rights if you ask.
All the best, @yamadapc