The more I think about my blog as my personal-but-public online journal and less as a “capital-W” Website, the more I appreciate (and long for) Tumblr’s tools for easily dumping just about anything onto a webpage at your own domain and having it look pretty good.
@jarrod Tumblr post types are brilliant and a great authoring interface.
The Tumblr dashboard kind of sucks though, and custom themes are a mess. I wish that Micro.blog would support Hugo’s post types and be smart about them in the compose interface.
@jarrod I used Tumblr as my website for a few years, from around 2012-2015. It was great. I ended up switching because I wanted something that worked better on the open web (supporting meta tags, for example). But the composing tools were really nice, and any type of post I wanted to make fit in perfectly. My blog was definitely less formal back then, which has its benefits.
@jsonbecker @jarrod I tested out a custom Micro.blog theme way back when using categories to designate post types, then applying a class that could be targeted by CSS. It worked but seemed clumsy, as it had to iterate through a case list for each new post. I'm really hoping Manton can add these last holdouts from Hugo into MB.
While my opinion is stilll that Hugo templates are awkward to work with, credit where it's due that Hugo itself is incredibly capable and powerful.
@pimoore @jarrod my experience with Hugo is that it makes about as much sense as any other static site templating I’ve used. I don’t love the leaking go, but I can live with it. However, aversion to metadata on Micro.blog does tie our hands a bit as someone who uses Hugo— a lot can be done with custom front matter including post types. On my personal site, I had 3-4 layouts. I could imagine doing quite a few here. I’d love to write a plugin with a gallery post type that just takes a list of photos and alt text for them and does the kind of layout work people want from glightbox, for example. But that’s hard to expose as an editing interface unless the platform just does it (and IMO, micro.blog absolutely should make gallery posts a first class citizen, but then again, Manton started with photo-less). I also want to do a book-specific layout and a Letters layout. All achievable other ways, but cleaner with post types.
And I really love tumblr’s post-type system and creation tools. They’re absolutely first class.
@jsonbecker @pimoore @jarrod Re: Micro.blog and photos, if you see the Discover timeline, it's mostly photos so Micro.blog even in its curated form, is more photos than text so I agree, that we need more attention paid to how it handles photos. BTW having multiple photos in a post will not get you featured on Discover, so there's a kind of paradox that Micro.blog is still grappling with - post photos but not too many.
@jsonbecker @jarrod I love these ideas, let's hope they can come to fruition with more access to the innards of Hugo. One thing I would definitely want is for front matter access through both the web UI and third party app APIs. That way you can add and customize the YAML from wherever you choose to write, and still access all the power under the hood.
@jsonbecker @pimoore @jarrod I miss Tumblr's post types so much! I also can't agree with @pratik strongly enough. Photo posts are an essential part of Micro.blog but are still treated as second-class compared to text. Including more than one photo in a post is a completely manual copy/paste process that is all but impossible to accomplish on mobile without bouncing between a text editing app and your Uploads library.
Correction: The new Micro.blog app does support multiple photo uploads in the post composition window, I just never tried again after the old app didn’t support it.
I still think the Uploads library lacking any search, tagging, or bulk management tools of any kind still shows how lesser and ephemeral photos are viewed by the service.
@gregmoore @pimoore @jsonbecker @jarrod In large part I agree to this. Also, I wish we could get rid of the margin in the iOS app (which I’m using (99%) exclusively), so that images especially can take up the full width of the screen by default. I wrote a post about this (difference between Mastodon and Micro.Blog a while back).
@gregmoore @jsonbecker @jarrod @pratik Agreed with all of this. I’m lucky enough that I’m not a photo-heavy poster, but even I’ve found the basic workflow awkward enough to always use Mimi to upload and grab Markdown links.
@jarrod @jsonbecker @devondundee @pimoore It's fascinating to see this lasting love for Tumblr post types! It's something that has been in the back of my mind as well over the past year. 🤔
@jsonbecker they more I play with Hugo and understand how powerful it is on a sandbox site I have running locally, more I feel the limitations of hosting it on Micro.blog. It's great. But we could have so much more.
@pcora there’s very real, considerable challenges to creating a UI that’s good on top of fully customized Hugo. I don’t think it’s an easy problem, and for me, I am more than willing to give up some of the tinkering flexibility I had to not have to run a build system and have the power of a Micropub/xml-rpc API for apps to use and things like crossposting.
A huge issue with things as custom as Hugo is figuring out how to map standards on top. For instance, lots of folks want text editors to interact with MB like they’re MarsEdit and do full on management while also wanting unlimited customization while also being able to simply post from their phone while also having a social mechanism that also doesn’t encourage metrics while also being deeply concerned about what gets put in discovery for reach while also not wanting search or hashtags while also wanting a completely native Mastodon experience while also being able to use a Mastodon client while also not having to know any code beyond basic markdown…
This is a hard product to build.
@gregmoore On a side note, how did you manage to get strikethrough working on here? I’ve always had troubles with it, even though I used proper markdown.
@pimoore They don’t seem to work with the regular markdown ~~like this~~. I had to use html <s> tags.
@jsonbecker Right? Building a product that appeals to picky nerds means a lot of opinionated feature requests.
I didn’t know Hugo was so powerful under the hood, nor that it is somewhat hamstrung in the MB implementation. But that does give me hope for some more Tumblr-like improvements at some point.
@jarrod I would reframe it, which is to say that Micro.blog is remarkably powerful because it’s Hugo under the hood. However, some of the goals of making a product out of Hugo blog generation and hosting that can succeed with a lay audience, and some of the goals of making Micro.blog as a product, necessarily conflicts with very easy, slick access to everything Hugo can do.
Hugo is so vast, I don’t think just about any one person understands it all. It’s truly some mix between a Ferrari and a Homer car that Manton has significantly wrangled to make it more accessible.
It’s truly some mix between a Ferrari and a Homer car that Manton has significantly wrangled to make it more accessible.
Thank you for this analogy, and reminding me of one of my favourite Simpsons episodes of all time.
