New year, new theme for the site

Hello Friend

Since I started with this blog in 2019, I’ve used the hello-friend-ng theme by rhazdon for this site. This theme is based on the hello-friend and hermit Hugo themes. The theme includes multilingual support, light/dark mode and of course features a responsive design.

I already made some of my own changes to this theme, such as integrating microformats into it. These microformats (notably h-card and h-entry) are used to provide metadata while sharing links from this site on the metaverse (e.g. Mastodon and Bluesky). The h-card is also used to do IndieAuth.

Poison

While working on these updates to the theme, I also browsed around for different themes. And that’s how I stumbled upon Poison by lukeorth.

This theme also features a responsive design and light/dark mode. A post’s Table of Content is displayed in the sidebar instead of just at the top of the article. However, it does not include multilingual support, so that’s something I may need to add in the future. New in this theme is the use of series to better link related posts with each other (see the HA Container series for example).

I’m already adapting this theme within my own fork to fit my needs. First of all I started to add microformats to this theme as well. I also did some back-end changes like reformatting some code, changing how links in the sidebar works, and how post metadata is displayed. Multilingual support is something I plan on adding to this theme as well.

Fediverse integration

While doing all of this, I also joined Bluesky and setup Bridgy Fed so that new articles are posted on Mastodon and Bsky. I’m have a blog post in my drafts that I need to finished about this … (TODO for 2025).

Next up I want to integrate Webmentions on this site as well. Allowing people on the fediverse to like, comment, … on this site without being dependent on cloud services like Disqus that may track people across the internet.