Tagappearance¹⁰

Somebody translates their posts, opens the Czech half of the site — and the menu still says Writing, the footer still says Links, and every tag on every pill is the English word. The posts were only ever half of what a reader reads. The rest is what the site says about itself, and in 1.9 that has a language too.

Two real sites wear a look this engine never shipped. sh.cynicky.blog is dressed as Ghost — a full-width lead card, a dotted frame, tiles instead of a plain list. arch-linux.cz is dressed as a Hugo theme, Blowfish specifically — a compact bar, a profile block, cards laid out like someone else's homepage entirely. Neither forked the engine. Neither edited a template. Both still take a plain git pull.

One stylesheet, loaded last

site.extra_css in config/site.yml names a path, or a list of them, loaded after the engine's own colors.css and site.css. That's the entire mechanism — a skin is one file of yours that repaints what's already on the page, and the engine never writes to it, so an update can never conflict with it.

Local paths only: every page carries style-src 'self', and a stylesheet on another host would just be dropped by the browser with no error anyone would ever see — the build refuses a remote path out loud instead, before that silence has a chance to happen.

A reader changed one border colour in site.css, ran a rebuild, and waited while the build produced, byte for byte, every page that was already there. He asked why. The answer was one word in one list, and 1.7 takes it out.

What a build writes down

Since 1.6 the build keeps a record of what went into each page it wrote -- the post, the posts around it, the labels, the numbers a page counts. On the next build a page whose record has not moved is not rendered at all. Not rendered and then found identical: not rendered. The summary at the end says how many pages were left alone, the first number to look at when a build is slow.

The record holds only while the engine that wrote it is the same engine, so it hangs off a fingerprint of what the engine is made of -- the files under templates/, lib/, build/, locales/ and config/, hashed by contents rather than by timestamp. Change any of it and the record is discarded entire, because any of it can change every page.

Why the colour cost the archive

The example configuration this engine ships carries a bicycle: a tag called kolo, and under it an <svg> written out by hand. It is there because there was nothing else to put there. tag_icons took the name of an icon the engine ships or a drawing of your own, and the ones it shipped were the eight content types — text, image, video, link, audio, quote, document, chat. A tag about cycling could wear the glyph for "audio", or somebody could spend an evening with a coordinate grid.

1.7 puts fifty-five drawings in between, and gives each of them a name.

Fifty-five nouns

Counted in lib/icons.rb: the eight content types, fifty-five more, sixty-three names a tag may ask for. Grouped by what a blog turns out to be about.

Every post wears a date badge with an icon in it, and the icon says what kind of post it is: text, a picture, a video, a quote. On a blog where nearly everything is text, that icon is the same on nearly every card. Somebody running this engine put it plainly in issue #45: one sees the generic icon so often that it becomes invisible, or clutter.

1.6 lets a tag carry an icon instead.

tag_icons:
  - tag: "build"
    icon_svg: '<svg viewBox="0 0 24 24" …>…</svg>'
  - tag: "comments"
    icon: "chat"

It replaces rather than adds

On a post's date badge the tag's icon takes the place of the content-type icon; in the heading of /tag/<name>/ it takes the place of the generic tag icon. That was the requester's first point, and the one worth asking about rather than guessing: two icons side by side on a 60-pixel badge is not a badge, it is a puzzle. A tag with no entry changes nothing, so the generic icon is still there for everything you have not named.

A post gets read, and then it goes somewhere: into a toot, a message, an email to one person. Until now the reader did that by copying the address out of the bar. 1.6 puts a row of controls under the post for it — off unless share: names what you want, drawn in the order you name it.

share:
  - mastodon
  - bluesky
  - email
  - copy
  - system

What is prefilled, and what is not

The post's name and its address, where the target takes both. Facebook and LinkedIn take the address alone and read the name off the page. The reader writes the part that is theirs. bluesky, email, facebook, linkedin, threads and x are plain links, one address each, no script behind them.

Three that are not links

The sidebar has a commits card. Until now it read GitHub, full stop — which is a strange default for an engine whose natural habitat is the Fediverse, where the code lives on Codeberg or on somebody's own Forgejo, and GitHub is the mirror you keep for one widget's sake.

One of the first people outside this project to run the engine asked the obvious question, and the answer shipped: widgets.commits.instance takes the server's address, and that is the whole configuration.

One key, not two

There is no forge_type beside it. An address already answers what kind of host it is — Gitea and Forgejo speak the same API, and a key that must agree with another key is a config mistake waiting for its moment. Leave instance out and the card reads GitHub, exactly as before.

Cheaper than the original

Dressing a site differently used to mean editing a file the engine owns. It worked, right up until the next git pull, which is the moment you find out that customisation and updates were the same file all along.

Four things that needed a modified template are settings now.

Both of these sites are this engine, built from the same commit on the same evening:

An earlier post here explains that every colour on this site comes from seven keys in a config file. That part hasn't changed. What has changed is that you no longer have to imagine what those seven values will look like before you commit to them.

Choosing between fourteen hex values is exactly as blind in a wizard as it is in YAML. So ./style.sh shows you.

Seven palettes, one keystroke

Whole palettes now ship in config/palettes.yml, light and dark both:

• Default blue, warm, monochrome and high contrast — the four from the gallery on this site, whose light modes are exactly what that page showed. Their dark modes are new; the gallery only ever had light homepages.
• Sunflower, cream and gold with olive links — the golden yellow stays on the tag pills, because yellow text on cream cannot be read and the accent here is above all a text colour.
• Garden, greens and khaki.
• Ocean, steel blue over navy.

There is not a single colour value in this site's stylesheet.

Every colour you're looking at right now — background, text, links, the navigation, the little tag pills — comes from seven keys in config/site.yml. The build compiles them into a colors.css file, and site.css just uses the variables. Change seven lines, rebuild, and the site is someone else entirely.

Here's a complete light-mode palette:

colors:
  light:
    bg: "#f5f8fa"
    text: "#444a5a"
    meta_text: "#657784"
    accent: "#1da1f2"
    nav_bg: "#eaf5fd"
    border: "#e1e8ed"
    pill_bg: "#d6ecfc"

And here's the same homepage in five palettes — nothing changed between these shots except seven lines of YAML and a rebuild: