Matthew Lang

The idea of a three-column theme for a Micro.blog is growing on me.

Bothy was a nice starter for learning about how themes work in Hugo and Micro.blog, but I would like to do more with a theme.

Here are just a few ideas I thought of for a new theme

• Show a header image - I like the idea of a header image for your website. I love the simplicity of text, but having a more visual theme is something that I think is missing from the current collection of Micro.blog themes.
• Show a micro update using emojis or just one word - A little bit of extra meta to let people know what you are up to.
• Show the latest image(s) from a category - Showing images from a particular category would add another visual element to the page.
• Show recent posts - A staple of many a WordPress blog back in the day. Time for this to make a comeback!

With such a larger number of elements for this theme, I might start off with a blank HTML page and start outlining what I need using Tailwind CSS to get a quick prototype up and running. I can then iterate on that for a while, working out the finer points. Once I am happy with it, I can then start building the theme using the finished prototype.

I have made lots of mistakes building the Bothy theme, and I have even shipped some of those mistakes as well! On the positive side, I have learned a lot from it.

The next theme should be more of a straightforward process, but I won’t be starting on that until the darker nights have kicked in.

Bothy now supports category pages and the recently added category intro text.

Update is available in the plugins page.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been adding colour theme support to the Bothy theme, and it should now be available in the Micro.blog plug-ins as an update.

The light/dark theme toggle was nice to implement, but I also wanted to add some colour to my blog. Not for others to see, but for myself. I like being able to switch the colours on my blog according to my mood. The fact that others can do it for themselves is just a little bonus.

This was definitely fun to implement, and I think I am now at the point where I can leave the theme alone for a few days and focus on other things. This isn’t the end of the theme’s development, though. Several outstanding fixes still need to be done, but these will be addressed at some point next week.

It’s taken me a lot longer than I thought, but I finally finished my own Micro.blog theme, Bothy.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to build my own Micro.blog theme, but I kept putting it off. After playing around with TailwindCSS to get something up and running, I started to see how I wanted my own theme to look. Nothing fancy, a single-column layout with a simple header and just a little bit of CSS to make it easy to read. After a few attempts at getting a workflow going for it, I finally managed to ship a working version of the theme.

It’s by no means finished, and there will likely be a flurry of updates as I address any issues that arise and add other partials and templates that I might have missed or haven’t styled.

Full docs are available on the theme’s Micro.blog site, and you’ll find the source code on SourceHut as well. There is a repo on GitHub, but this is just to allow Micro.blog to pick up changes to the blog so that it can be updated as a plug-in.

If you’re curious as to how it looks, you can take a look at my blog or the Bothy website.

Bothy can be installed from the plug-ins directory.

Enjoy!

I tried to get back to working on my theme for Micro.blog last night. I managed to hold out for a few minutes before tiredness and frustration kicked in.

I have a theme working locally with Hugo. I have created a theme on Micro.blog and have started uploading the individual templates, but it seems like such a chore, and there are some differences between my theme locally and what is on Micro.blog, in that my Hugo themes don’t always work on Micro.blog.

Is there a more effective way to do this?

Taken the first steps with my own Micro.blog theme, bothy. Still a while to go before it’s ready as a plug-in.