Plugin: Search Space

Sven Dahlstrand’s plugin Search Space is now at version 1.0.0:

Search Space is your trusty companion for finding posts and replies deep down your Micro.blog’s archive. Features like search suggestions and links to timeline conversations make it easy and fun to rediscover your old posts and replies.

🔭 Search Space is out of beta! 🥂 New in version 1.0.0:

  • 🎙️ Transcripts can be indexed!
  • 🪚 Post content in search results is truncated at 300 characters.
  • 🗂️ Indexing replies and transcripts are optional.
  • 👋 The greeting text (Welcome to Search Space …) can be edited in the settings.

Transcripts plugin

Manton has added automated transcripts of podcast episodes. Instructions are at Podcast transcripts - Podcasting - Micro.blog Help Center:

When you create a blog post that links to that MP3 with an audio tag (which Micro.blog on the web will do automatically for you), Micro.blog will associate the transcript with the blog post. By default, it will also include a link to the transcript from the published blog post.

Options to control this feature are available by installing the plug-in “Transcripts”. From the plug-in’s settings, you can disable transcription or disable the blog post transcript link.

There are additional instructions for those with Custom themes.

Link: Special Content pages

Over on the Help site Todd asked about creating special collection pages:

I’d like to create special collection pages that do the following.

  1. Let me create a custom section of content at the top. (think: intro, description, maybe some links or disclaimers)
  2. Automated collection of posts with a certain tag. Preferably with options for me on how to display (alphabetical, chronoligical, reverse-chronological, etc.)

There's a detailed answer that begins:

My favorite way to do this is to make a custom layout like:

layouts/thepagename/list.html

Then I put my template there

Link: Easy Category Pages in Navigation on Micro.Blog

Bob Wertz wrote a How To called Easy Category Pages in Navigation on Micro.Blog:

It shouldn’t matter what theme you are using, but for my site, I use the Pure plug in, which is a good foundation to build from. By default, the template presents a home page that includes all of your posts. Instead, I wanted to have different links in my navigation for my longer “blog” posts and my shorter “tweet-like” status posts.

Read the details at his site.

Use the Custom Home page plugin and link to Posts

One of the Plugins available to hosted Micro.Blogs is Custom home page, which replaces your blog home page with text instead of recent posts.

That led to a question on the Help Forum: Is there any way to have the modified main page and have a menu item for “Blog” that goes to posts?

The answer came from jsonbecker:

Make a custom template called layouts/blog/list.html. Then you can make a page in your custom theme by making a file named content/blog.md…

Lastly, on your main page, you can now link to /blog and that will use the template above.

For more detailed instructions and any follow-up see the Help Forum page.

Avoid email spam while posting an email address on your blog

A discussion in the Micro.blog Help Center on How to obfuscate email links in order to avoid spam brought some useful suggestions, including:

  • add a link on say, a Contact page and use robots.txt to make that page not indexed. — Suggested by @jsonbecker
  • use a service like Apple’s Hide My Email to get a unique address (if you get overwhelmed with spam, just generate a new one). — Suggested by @sod

To use robots.txt see the instructions at Search engine indexing. Jason in the Help forum suggested something like this in robots.txt if your email link was on a page whose URL was [example.com/contact](http://example.com/contact) : 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /contact

If you want to create an Hidden Email link on an Apple Mac using OS 13, Ventura:

  1. Go to System Settings ☛ Apple ID ☛ iCloud ☛ Hide My Email.
  2. In the Hide my Email listings window click the + at bottom left.
  3. Follow the instructions to create a new Hidden Email Address. You have the opportunity at the end of the process to copy the email address.
Hide my Email in System Settings.
Hide my email listings window.

Plugin: Bear theme

Manton Reece writes:

Still a little experimental, but I added a new plug-in for Micro.blog based on the theme in Bear Blog. Nice lightweight design that looks good and should be pretty easy to customize.

Link: Custom Theme Tips

Greg Moore has written a handy Custom Theme Tips page:

Making a custom theme for your Micro.blog isn’t as impossible as it may first seem. Be kind to yourself, work in small chunks, and prioritize needs over novelties. It’s your custom theme so you can always add more shiny new things later.

Link: How to hide (but not delete) core pages

See a discussion on hiding pages such as Photos and Archive at the Micro.blog Help Center — How can I hide (but not delete) core pages?:

Q: I want the photos & archive pages to exist, but not be visible in the blog category links.

A: Photos and Archives really should have that “Include this page” checkbox. I’ll work on adding that. In the meantime you will probably need to create a custom theme that overrides the header to just show the links you want instead of having Micro.blog manage it.

The discussion includes specific techniques.

Link: Creating Labarum (Part 1): Design and initialization

Mandaris Moore has written the first of a series documenting how he created a new theme for Micro.Blog — Creating Labarum (Part 1): Design and initialization:

I wanted to create a new theme for Micro.blog, and I thought I would document all the steps that I went through. The creation of the theme was an iterative process for me and this tutorial works in that way.

This is comprehensive and informative. Look out for the continuation of the series.

Add Reading Time to your Micro.blog template

Eric Gregorich in https://ericgregorich.com/2022/12/15/add-reading-time.html writes:

I added Reading time to my blog. It was easy to do since it’s part of Hugo.

It is only displaying if the reading time exceeds 1 minute.

In the layouts/posts/single.html template, add the following line below the date (or where ever you want it to display).

{{ if gt .ReadingTime 1 }} Reading Time: {{ .ReadingTime }} minutes{{ end }}

Maybe I’ll add this as an optional feature in the Cards theme soon. 😋

16 December 2022