Conversation with my own brain while trying to fall asleep last night:
🧠“Make a custom theme for your Micro.blog”
🧔‍♂️ “I already have too many personal projects and everybody just uses the timeline or apps anyway.”
🧠“Remember Hey Loura!?”
🧔‍♂️ “I’ll start in the morning.”
Hey @pimoore, since you’ve been running your own custom theme for a good while now, how often have you had to make updates to keep it compatible with new Micro.blog features?
@gregmoore That’s a good question, as I haven’t updated it in quite a long time. 🤔 I need to get myself back on the theming train again though, and re-spark my creativity. What features were you wondering about in terms of compatibility?
@pimoore Nothing specific. Maybe the bookshelf is a good example? I ask because I’m tinkering with a custom theme of my own but concerned that I could also be building incompatibility into it. The fact that you haven’t had to think of it in so long sounds like good news to me.🙂👍🏻
@gregmoore If you’re referring to the original bookshelves that could be added as a page, I believe I accounted for that in my testing. I haven’t looked at the newest plug-in that lets you have multiple bookshelves on the same page (I think that’s what it does?).
@pimoore Yes, I’ve used both and settled on the new plug-in because I like having multiple book lists on the same page.
It sounds like I’m worrying over nothing. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience.
@gregmoore Honestly, the biggest “incompatibility“ I’ve built into mine is shortcodes. They’re useful no doubt but at a price of lock-in, as you’re forced to carry them forward with every single theme. If you don’t maintain the templates your site will fail to build when you switch themes. This is ignoring whatever styling you were using would be out of place in the new theme, assuming it would even make sense at all.
I guess the latter could be avoided by making sure you have no shortcodes that are targeted by CSS, but you’d still have to port each template going forward.
@pimoore Yeah, I love shortcodes but they are pretty fragile in the long term. We’ve been bitten by them at my work and quickly moved away from using them.
I’m not looking to do anything super fancy at first, just make something competent that I can control better when I want to change something. I really like Marfa but it’s navigation can’t handle more than a couple links and it’s structured with unordered lists instead of DIVs. I want a proper CSS grid to control.
@gregmoore Yes, I quickly realized the value of sticking with standard, semantic HTML. Not only does it avoid breakage like this, but it’s also easier to write. Case in point: how shortcodes are typed into Ulysses is different than Drafts. While this is based on how they both handle Markdown, it doesn’t change the fact it adds a frustration to editing posts.
everybody just uses the timeline or apps anyway.
Lowkey, my biggest pet peeve about micro.blog. This fascination with "the feed" hurts my soul.
@mariovillalobos To be fair, I feel like Micro.blog’s timeline feels totally different from the social network newsfeeds because it’s:
I think my original comment speaks more to my own vanity (desiring everyone to admire the dressing around my photos and words) than a fundamental problem with this service.
