Potentially returning to Sourcehut and my FOSS roots

I wrote about why I’d been considering moving back to Github to host the source code for the blog last month and talked about why Sourcehut builds and the restrictions on content were my primary motive. I also mentioned the changes I’d made to the website itself, including the Bluesky comments section I’d added to posts. I, however, had second thoughts about the whole move, what with the new theme and all its fancy features, very few of which I actually used and how the shift back to Github meant that I was giving up on the completely open source services offered by Sourcehut for the not-very transparent service offered by Github.

The theme looked nice, with all the soft pastel colours and the fancy CSS but I had really not had a chance to go through most of the code myself. Going back to the theme’s repo, I see now that there is a little bit of JavaScript too. Now, it’s not that all JS is bad but when I’d started this website and blog, I’d decided that I wouldn’t use any of it, especially for wholly unnecessary things such as appearances because I just am not familiar enough with it. I just wanted a very basic, functional site which was lightweight and easy to maintain. So I set out again, scouting for themes that seemed to offer this — a minimal look and something very basic I could build on — and came across a few.

Mini seemed like something easy to work with and I gave it a shot but it turned out to be really badly maintained and a lot of it wasn’t updated to work with newer Hugo versions. I saw that the repo had multiple open pull requests for fixes that just hadn’t been looked at by the maintainer. And it just kept throwing errors every time I tried to run a local Hugo server to see if it worked. I actually ended up spending most of my time fixing them. It also didn’t have a dark theme, something which I would’ve liked.

Etch was a theme I’d tried out when I initially started out with this blog, after switching to Hugo and my whole Emacs-based setup. I had discarded it for something based off Drew’s website. But looking at Neil’s blog, which I’d come across while searching for something, I realised that I could make this work. It was just after I’d put in the final touches on the Congo theme setup that I got the pangs to go back to a ridiculously simple theme such as this. I took a while to make up my mind and then made the jump after showing it in action to a few people.

I had made a few changes to make the theme work for me. It had a landing page that listed out all posts but it used a very odd set of layouts for this. An index.html template that called the posts.html partial which in turn used a ridiculously simple code that had li.html from /layouts/_defaults/ render a list of posts. I modified the posts.html template such that the list generated would organise posts by year of publishing, in an “archives” sort of fashion. I didn’t like how the article date was part of the link too so I moved it out of the <a> tag.

{{ range (.Paginate ((where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "in" .Site.MainSections).GroupByDate "2006")).PageGroups }}
<h2> {{ .Key }} </h2>

<ul id="posts">


  {{ range .Pages }}
  <li>
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}"> {{ .Title }}</a>
    <small><time>{{ .Date | time.Format (i18n "posts.date") }}</time></small>
  </li>
  {{ end }}

</ul>
<br>
{{- end }}

I also didn’t like the default date format so I changed it by added /i18n/en.toml with dates formatted in my preferred style. This is actually part of the theme’s wiki. I also added a layout for the fiction section that was more-or-less like the default but with the date on the list outside the hyperlink tag like with the template for the homepage.

I added a very basic “info” line indicating posts that were part of series on the top of articles (it was called in the single.html template). The series template I ended up using was ridiculously simple unlike the ones I found online which had too many features like those that listed out articles in the series, which I didn’t feel like I needed, considering that the theme already generated a list of these in the taxonomies.

{{ if .Params.series }}
<div class="info">

  <p>This article is part of the <a href="/series/{{ .Params.series | urlize }}">{{ .Params.series }}</a> series.</p>

</div>
{{ end }}

I was on the fence about comments, which was a crucial part of why I’d moved to Github, but I settled for a very basic link to the Bluesky post and a link to reply to the post to my public inbox which I’d set up a while back on Sourcehut lists. I think I’m happy with how this looks now.

I added the openring template from earlier, making it very simple and without almost any formatting (I even removed a bunch of styling elements I’d worked on from the CSS). Finally, I added a header-like footer menu to display important social links and added a link to my newly created privacy page that basically talks about how I respect everyone’s privacy and don’t offer cookies and the like. The RSS link is also down there now.

The font is as always, Monorale and the code blocks have Prot’s Modus theme, like what I had on my own Emacs until recently.

I had initially tested this out on the Sourcehut page that I got with my account and encountered a weird issue while building the site. Sourcehut builds would get stuck at the same point every time I pushed a commit to the repo — it was while openring was being run — and I testing a few things out with this. It looks like it’s got to do with feeds from WordPress blogs and I think it’s because RSS feeds from those aren’t part of the blogs themselves and rather seem to be files that are downloaded. This doesn’t seem to be an issue if I run the openring command from my terminal emulator or on Github and so I’m sticking to it for now, atleast until we find a fix for this on Sourcehut builds.

Well, that’s it for now. I hope to get back to writing that article I’d started on skramz last month but at this point, I have no idea when that’ll be ready.