Custom templates, categories, new theme, and more manton.org
@manton Damn it, Manton! Here I'm trying to not tinker around too much in the backend and you offer all these wonderful tools. Begrudging thanks.
@manton great update. You’re probably already thinking this, but I imagine people would love an auto detection of their microcast posts as Podcast or something like that.
@manton Ooh, this is a big release! Not at all surprised you ended up moving to Hugo given Jekyll’s infamous sluggishness; I imagine this involved quite a bit of re-architecting behind the scenes?
@manton Holy cats! That's incredible! I think this will finally push me over the edge and move my self hosted (and lately abandoned) blog here. 👏🏻 I tip my hat to you 🎩
@manton Congratulations. This is a huge update with a lot of moving parts. Thank you for doing this.
I think I'll save my questions for tomorrow.
@apulianas Exactly. I'm not sure if I'll add one for podcasts right away, or expose creating your own filters, e.g. if a post contains a certain HTML tag or word, assign a category.
@manton What's the reason for moving to Hugo? I've been hearing more and more that people have issues with Jekyll's speed
@smith Yep, performance is the big one. By opening up custom templates, we have to commit to supporting the markup syntax indefinitely, so I wanted to make sure it was the best fit for Micro.blog.
@paulrobertlloyd Thanks! Yes, it was a big project. Hopefully it will be mostly seamless for existing blogs, even if someone doesn't want to tinker with customization.
@frankm Great question. I'm still thinking through how GitHub mirroring should be updated for this. (And unfortunately it has been broken recently for most people.)
@manton I’m curious… does this mean I can 100% use a custom Hugo theme, or is there some limitation for example to the complexity/performance of it?
@manton Very nice! I’m not a template creator myself so I’ll be following along with what others do with the new flexibility. There are a few things I’d like to see different on my blog so this is a great opportunity to learn.
@manton This is super exciting. For categories in the API, is it just category object in the data object? “Category”: [“Category 1”, “Category 2”]?
@hutaffe There are a couple limitations (such as not being able to override the config file, for now) but I think many themes will work. I'll expand the documentation and try to come up with some best practices / tutorials.
@craigmcclellan Yes, that's it. Let me know if you have any trouble. You can also query existing parameters using ?q=category via Micropub.
@manton So much cool new stuff!
So adding a category to a new post is exclusive to the Mac app right now?
I don’t see a way to add a category to a new post on the web, though I can edit/modify previously published posts.
@rnv To keep things simple, it only shows the categories if you are writing a longer post on the web with a title. We will probably adjust this. As a work-around you can type over 280 characters, add a temporary title, and then reset it to what you really want to post.
@manton Everything I've hoped for! Very excited to kick the tires on these additions. Thank you for making a goood thing better!
@manton Ah, clever — almost too clever.
Another question: With external Wordpress blogs, there’s a way to specify which tags do — or don’t — feed into your M.b timeline, because each tag has its own rss or json feed. Any plan for a similar behavior here? That is, where a post with a specific tag won’t appear in the timeline, so that you can post a shorter message with an intro and link to the longer post? (Does this make sense?)
@manton such a great way to begin the new year on. I'm super excited to kick the tires, its going to be a fun February!
@manton This is cool. I’m gonna have to go and dive in and see what I need to undo or redo... solid changes here 🙏🏾
@manton Great stuff!! So a list of your categories should appear at the top of the Archive page? I categorized some posts to a "Photos" category, but do not see that category at the top of the Archive page..... Great work!
@manton this is wicked exciting! Is there anyway to do some themeing without a hosted micro.blog account myself? I'd love to make some themes to share with folks.
@eli I assume you want to use the Micro.blog tools, rather than sharing via GitHub? If so this sounds like a good use case for having a free Hosted 'test' account, with limits on access to the timeline and the like.
@manton These are some great updates to the platform, Manton. I hope (and am sure in a way) that there would a lot many options for themes now out of box. Kudos! 👍😊
@simonwoods I'd share whatever I make on GitHub for certain, I would just love a way to validate whatever I make against a bona fide account -- so I think a test acount would 100% fill that need.
@manton And I love this new theme Arabica -- simple and elegant. Fits perfectly in Micro.blog design world 🙂
@manton fantastic work Manton! I wanted to ask if the cross posts from ownyourgram got broken as a result of this new rollout or if I’m doing something wrong?
@toddgrotenhuis This should work. I just tested one of mine with Inoreader and it was fine. The URL: YOUR[dot]DOMAIN/categories/CATEGORYNAME/feed[dot]xml
@manton this is massive, and pretty much blowing my mind. Categories + hugo + custom themes is a big deal, and some of why I kept json.blog separate from micro.json.blog and now my brain is exploding.
Nice work. I wonder if this means things like hugo shortcodes (the built in ones) work for longer form posts?
Also, I'd love to hear about the choice of hugo (assuming performance?) and all of this across like 3 episodes of Developing Perspective because I literally could not hear enough about this.
@manton - Oh wow! We even get custom RSS feeds for categories! Perfect!
This is exciting because I'm trying to keep in touch with the Google+ Tabletop community (Google+ was weirdly big in the tabletop role playing game community) after Google+ goes away. Some of us are going back to blogging and there are various efforts to set up aggregators of blog content and such after Google+ shuts down. My blog is pretty general, but I do talk about role playing games some. I wouldn't want all of my content going into those aggregators (and they wouldn't want all of it!) so an RSS feed of just what goes into my tabletop game category is perfect!
@manton I’ve created two categories to test, and the API isn’t pulling anything. It’s getting an array called categories, but there are no items in the array.
@craigmcclellan Can you send some more details to help@micro.blog? I'm checking your blog and everything looks correct for the 2 categories.
@manton figured it out. It would help if I were using a token for this account instead of @theclassnerd. 🤦🏻♂️