I have a collection of posts in my blog’s archives that mostly contain links with a single image and a comment. A lot of the links for these posts are now returning 404s. I’m tempted to just bring all the images together in a single Micro.blog collection and remove the posts.
Time for a three-column theme for Micro.blog?
The idea of a three-column theme for a Micro.blog is growing on me.
Bothy was a nice starter for learning about how themes work in Hugo and Micro.blog, but I would like to do more with a theme.
Here are just a few ideas I thought of for a new theme
- Show a header image - I like the idea of a header image for your website. I love the simplicity of text, but having a more visual theme is something that I think is missing from the current collection of Micro.blog themes.
- Show a micro update using emojis or just one word - A little bit of extra meta to let people know what you are up to.
- Show the latest image(s) from a category - Showing images from a particular category would add another visual element to the page.
- Show recent posts - A staple of many a WordPress blog back in the day. Time for this to make a comeback!
With such a larger number of elements for this theme, I might start off with a blank HTML page and start outlining what I need using Tailwind CSS to get a quick prototype up and running. I can then iterate on that for a while, working out the finer points. Once I am happy with it, I can then start building the theme using the finished prototype.
Picked up these A6 notebooks that Atoms To Astronauts were selling. This set of notebooks comprises of covers from maths, chemistry and physics.
Just 48 pages in each notebook, which I didn’t think was a lot, but it’s the same as a standard Field Notes notebook.
Bothy 1.0.0 is finally here. Summaries are now supported, as well as several styling fixes included. A good time to give it a major release.
I have made lots of mistakes building the Bothy theme, and I have even shipped some of those mistakes as well! On the positive side, I have learned a lot from it.
The next theme should be more of a straightforward process, but I won’t be starting on that until the darker nights have kicked in.
Bothy now supports category pages and the recently added category intro text.
Update is available in the plugins page.
Great afternoon of golf with the wee guy. Getting to the point where he now takes money off me every time we go out now. 😂
Bothy 0.2.0 is here!
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been adding colour theme support to the Bothy theme, and it should now be available in the Micro.blog plug-ins as an update.
Back to school with AI?
In a couple of weeks, it’s the start of another school year here in Scotland. Another to-do list comes with the usual items for this time of year. School uniform, school bag, topping up the meals account and many other things. I’ve added another potential item to the list.
AI subscription.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the many other AI subscription services became popular at an ideal time for my oldest. He was in his final year of school. He was curious about how it could be used to aid his homework and studies. I showed him how I use it for my own coding and learning, and its benefits.
He used it to his benefit in his first year of college and finished with good grades in his coursework. I also reinforced to him that it shouldn’t be used to do the work for him. Research, yes; learning, yes, but final essays and coursework should be his work and his work alone. He’s now off to college in the US in a couple of weeks, and I think he’ll use it well to help his studies.
My youngest is going into his second year of high school, and now I am wondering if I should be onboarding him to AI tools to help his studies. In his first year of high school, he didn’t get much homework, and trying to ensure he was on the right level for his age was difficult. My thought process behind introducing him to AI tools at this age is to show him how to use these tools correctly and not just use them as copy-and-paste tools.
AI tools are here to stay, and my hope is that by onboarding him to these tools early, he uses them correctly and enhances his learning. I’m also hoping that he finds another use for them beyond schoolwork. He’s pretty creative and has a good imagination. It’s a quality that his teachers commented on in primary school, but in high school, he’s yet to find an outlet for this. It might be that introducing him to these AI tools now would not only help his schoolwork but also provide him with access to other topics he might want to learn about.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that introducing him now to these tools is the right move, and in doing so, would ensure that he’s comfortable with AI tools and how to use them appropriately.
The Bothy theme is here!
It’s taken me a lot longer than I thought, but I finally finished my own Micro.blog theme, Bothy.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to build my own Micro.blog theme, but I kept putting it off. After playing around with TailwindCSS to get something up and running, I started to see how I wanted my own theme to look. Nothing fancy, a single-column layout with a simple header and just a little bit of CSS to make it easy to read. After a few attempts at getting a workflow going for it, I finally managed to ship a working version of the theme.
It’s by no means finished, and there will likely be a flurry of updates as I address any issues that arise and add other partials and templates that I might have missed or haven’t styled.
Full docs are available on the theme’s Micro.blog site, and you’ll find the source code on SourceHut as well. There is a repo on GitHub, but this is just to allow Micro.blog to pick up changes to the blog so that it can be updated as a plug-in.
If you’re curious as to how it looks, you can take a look at my blog or the Bothy website.
Bothy can be installed from the plug-ins directory.
Enjoy!