Why My Site Looks as It Does

When I wanted to relaunch my blog after a long hiatus, I thought I need to change the looks. My old site was good enough, but... well... it looked like something too simple. And while that simple was enough for me back then, I grew from it and demanded something bigger.

I immediately headed to themes.gohugo.io to search for a new look-and-feel. I stumbled upon the Indigo theme, which claimed to support something called IndieWeb.

I immediately DuckDuckGo'ed the unknown world and found the wiki. Reading it, I noted that it could make my blog really more cool and I decided on including it.

When I looked at the theme, it was a bit less than I expected. It didn't support anything beyond basic h-cards, h-entry and IndieAuth. Because of this I initially thought to abandon it, but then decided to expand and add new things.

I added a search-page based on Lunr.js from Story theme - I initially planned to use it, but then read about IndieWeb and... I talked about it two paragraphs ago! I also added WebMention support (powered by webmention.io), a carousel for photo posts (using OwlCarousel) and PGP key inside my h-card below. And replaced RSS feed with custom Atom feed. (I like Atom! both the editor and format 😉 - but for an editor I usually use vim)

All of this was performed by locally overriding the theme - look at my layouts/ folder!

layouts/
├── _default/
│   ├── li.html
│   ├── list.html
│   ├── note.html
│   ├── photo.html
│   └── single.html
├── index.html
├── index.json
├── index.xml
└── partials/
    ├── footer.html
    ├── head.html
    └── webmentions.html

2 directories, 11 files

I think I should send some patches in and alert the developer of that post... but it seems like this theme's developer - Angelo Stavrow - is using this theme himself. Which means I can't send you a webmention, so I'll just send you an email! 😊

In Angelo's defense - all features implemented there are almost flawless, and most of my modifications were concerned with implementing new features. I probably could keep a fork with all these changes and send pull requests when I finish organizing these things. Though I regularly have to remind myself to make commits in submodules - I always forget to do it!