Micro.blog launches Discourse help center cdevroe.com

@cdevroe I’d like to be able to figure out how to port a Hugo theme to work with m.b. as every one I’ve imported into a test site hasn’t (either partially or at all). This would be great to see available on the help forum.

@peterimoore Can you point me to a repository on Github for the theme(s) you've tried with M.b? Maybe I'll notice something quickly.

@cdevroe I was trying ones I liked from the Hugo Themes site, but I’ll have to look back at which ones. When I have a free chance I can make a list for you. Honestly, I wish Hugo had the quality of themes Jekyll has, as they’re much better IMO.

@peterimoore @cdevroe It would also be helpful info to have available at custom.micro.blog . 😀

@Miraz This is a nice resource as well. I wonder if you should consider taking all of the resources you've collected and put them into help.micro.blog? And then custom.micro.blog could be for sharing news and updates re: themes/plugins?

@peterimoore You’re not alone in this. I spent hours importing and trying Hugo themes on my test account last week and all of them seemed to have major incompatibilities so I gave up.

@gregmoore @peterimoore I spent some time yesterday on a Zoom call with @manton. He understands the need to spend more time on themes and from what I can tell they will be. Once Cypress is out and bug free, I plan on releasing a second M.b theme as well to help out.

@Miraz Something I noticed is that much of the code isn't able to be copied and pasted. Example

@cdevroe @gregmoore @manton That’s great to hear, I’ve seen a lot of Hugo themes that would be awesome to add to micro.blog. I’d gladly help to port some over if I knew what I was doing.

@cdevroe That's exciting news. It sounds lazy but part of why I love Micro.blog is because I don't have to put my developer hat on just to use it. I'm ready to pay for all your hard work. 😄

@cdevroe That seems like a smart idea, with the new Help system. I just wanted to do what I could to make something useful. Under Help would be a logical place for it. @help

@cdevroe Thanks for mentioning this, but I just visited that page on my Mac and copied and pasted a bunch of the code examples… ??

@peterimoore I have done this work before, and would be happy to help. I’d for sure take it as a post on the Discourse (or write it up on custom) so that others can benefit.

It’s actually pretty easy to do most Jekyll themes, I’d imagine. But Hugo is easiest, where you really just have to add a few magic things to the header and you’re 95% there. My own site was originally a custom Hugo blog I tweaked a little to bring over to M.b.

@jsonbecker I’d be very interested in learning this process, not just because I’m curious, but if I want to be able to tweak things more for myself in the future. Interesting comment about Jekyll themes, I’d think they’d be very difficult due to the different template language?

@peterimoore so for Hugo, all the official M.b themes are on the M.b GitHub. I basically just compared and figured it out. Some of those are forks from Jekyll that I think even have the diffs. While it’s true the template engines are different, they organizationally are accomplishing the same things so it’s 95% just small syntax tweaks.

@jsonbecker that’s something I’d really like to learn and have for reference. As I mentioned previously, I think good Jekyll themes are much more abundant, especially the couple I found that I’d like to use in Hugo potentially.

@peterimoore if you point me in the direction of one you like, I can peek at whether it’s one I think would be easy to convert and start blogging about the steps.

@jsonbecker this is gonna win you the internet if you’re not careful... 👍🏻 Here are my current top two Jekyll picks: - Tufte - Papyrus

Not sure if one of those would be easier than the other.

@jsonbecker if it helps, i also looked at Hitchens which seems like it might be less complicated than the other two, and also has support for title-less microposts.

@peterimoore quick look at tufte looks super easy, exception for the MathJax part I'm less sure of. The basic page/post layouts though are very straight forward and most of the work is in the css anyway.

@peterimoore looks like some folks from the R world already made a Tufte Hugo theme

This would work out of the box, though you might need/want to add this to the header:

<link rel="authorization_endpoint" href="https://micro.blog/indieauth/auth" />
<link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://micro.blog/indieauth/token" />
<link rel="micropub" href="https://micro.blog/micropub" />
<link rel="microsub" href="https://micro.blog/microsub" />
<link rel="webmention" href="https://micro.blog/webmention" />
<link rel="subscribe" href="https://micro.blog/users/follow" />

@gregmoore The best part is, you won't have to pay. So long as you're a paying member of Micro.blog, Cypress will be free for you to use.

@cdevroe @Miraz I'm seeing the same thing re: the code (Windows -> Firefox).

@jsonbecker interesting, I hadn’t seen that one. I still think the Jekyll version looks better when I compare them side-by-side, but I might test this one in the interim and see how it goes. I’ve looked around many times for a Jekyll to Hugo port tutorial and never found one.

@cdevroe @miraz I’ve had trouble with making sure M.b reads HTML as safe in code blocks and haven’t quite figured out an incantation to make it work consistently. Once I figure it out, I’ll share on custom/help.