plague

Overview

plague is a Minima-inspired theme that has some IndieWeb features like microformats. It also draws heavily from the Indigo theme.

There is a demo repo available at plague-demo-site and a demo site available here.

Installation

Hugo module

Initialize your repo for Hugo modules:

hugo mod init github.com/brianreumere/plague-demo-site

Then import the theme as a module in hugo.toml:

[module]
  [[module.imports]]
    disable = false
    ignoreConfig = false
    ignoreImports = true
    path = "github.com/brianreumere/plague"  # Theme

Git submodule

Alternately, add the theme as a Git submodule. Run the following command from your site directory and then add theme = "plague" to hugo.toml:

git submodule add https://github.com/brianreumere/plague.git themes/plague

Colors

There are two built-in color schemes, default and gibson. They will automatically set a dark or light variety based on a user’s preference (via the prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature). To force the site to always use the light or dark variety of a color scheme, specify default-light, default-dark, gibson-light, or gibson-dark for the colors parameter.

Default

Gibson

Accessibility

I’m not very experienced with web accessibility, but this theme does aim to be accessible to users who use the web with assistive technologies and devices. Some accessibility resources that were helpful are listed in the Resources section.

Minimum configuration

These are the minimum required settings in your site’s hugo.toml file for this theme to function (this example assumes you used the Hugo module method from the Installation section):

baseURL = "https://example.net"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "Ellingson Mineral Tech Blog"

[module]
  [[module.imports]]
    disable = false
    ignoreConfig = false
    ignoreImports = true
    path = "github.com/brianreumere/plague"  # Theme

[params]
  siteHeaderText = "Ellingson Mineral Tech Blog"

  colors = "default"

  [params.hcard]
    fullName = "Eugene Belford"

IndieWeb

h-card configuration

You can configure additional values in hugo.toml to populate your h-card. With the exception of fullName, everything is optional. The order of values in the social array determines the order of the social icons displayed in the footer.

For any social icons you would like to display, you need to store an SVG file in the icons directory at the root of your Hugo site. The icon filenames should match <platform>.svg, where <platform> is a value you specify in hugo.toml (see the example below). You can download icons from Font Awesome here. The social platforms specified below are just examples; you can add arbitrary ones as long as there is an icon file available and you write a url_pattern that inclues %s to specify where your username/handle/identity should be substituted to form a valid link.

[params]
  siteHeaderText = "Ellingson Mineral Tech Blog"
  siteFooterText = "Powered by [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) and the [plague](https://github.com/brianreumere/plague) theme. Hosted on the Gibson supercomputer ⌨️."

  [params.hcard]
    avatar = "images/i.jpg"
    fullName = "Eugene Belford"
    pronouns = [ "they", "them" ]
    nickname = "The Plague"
    showLocation = true
    city = "New York"
    region = "NY"
    country = "US"

    social = [
      { platform = "email", identity = "e.belford@example.net", url_pattern = "mailto:%s" },
      { platform = "github", identity = "brianreumere", url_pattern = "https://github.com/%s" }
    ]

See The Pronouns in my h-card regarding the pronoun h-card property.

showLocation can be set to false or deleted (along with city, region, and country) to not include any location info in your h-card.

The h-card is displayed in the site footer, and the default format of the h-card is in layouts/partials/hcard.html. If you want to customize the format, you can create a custom partial template at layouts/partials/hcard.html in your Hugo site directory.

The social icons are also part of the h-card, and their links will have the rel="me" attribute included.

h-entry

The fullName and avatar (if it exists) properties are used on pages that use the single layout (typically a single blog post or article).

Non-IndieWeb customizations

Additional footer text

This will render in the right-hand footer column, next to the h-card. Markdown is supported. For example:

[params]
  siteFooterText = "Powered by [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) and the [plague](https://github.com/brianreumere/plague) theme."

If you want multiple lines (see the TOML site):

[params]
  siteFooterText = """
Powered by [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/).

Styled with the [plague](https://github.com/brianreumere/plague) theme.
"""

Pages

Homepage

By default, the homepage will render Markdown-formatted content from content/_index.md. For example:

Welcome to the homepage. This is a list:

* First list item
* Second list item

[Check out this link](https://example.com/).

List of posts

If your site has a content/posts directory with blog posts, add a content/posts/_index.md file that looks something like this:

---
title: posts
menu:
  main:
    weight: 1
---

You can set the menu weight higher or lower to control its position in the site’s menu. You may also want to source post dates from filenames by including the following in hugo.toml:

[frontmatter]
  date = [':filename', ':default']

Standalone page

For a standalone page (for example, a page with contact info), create content/contact/index.md that looks something like this:

---
layout: standalone
title: contact
menu:
  main:
    weight: 2
---

[email](mailto:someone@example.com)

Hugo shortcodes

SVG icon

If you download an SVG icon (e.g., from Font Awesome) and place it in the icons directory at the root of your Hugo site repo (not in the content or static directories), you can use it inline with your Markdown content by using the icon shortcode. The parameter is the name of the icon file (without the .svg file extension). The SVG will have the aria-hidden="true" attribute added so it isn’t included in the accessibility tree, so do not use it for any interactive functionality; it should be purely decorative.

{{< icon "github" >}}

Callout

There is a Hugo shortcode implemented to display a paragraph of text with a custom class name callout and an ARIA note role. You can use this instead of the > Markdown blockquote syntax, since technically blockquotes are supposed to be actual quotations and not notes, call-outs, alerts, etc. (the <aside> tag also doesn’t seem appropriate for this use case since it’s intended to be for content that “could be considered separate [from the content around the aside element]).

For example:

{{< callout >}}
Make sure to do some stuff! This is important to read.
{{< /callout >}}

I might add additional shortcodes for differently colored callouts in the future.

Resources

The WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool from Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) and the MDN Accessibility documentation were helpful to get to an initial baseline of accessibility. I’d also encourage you to read about writing accessible Markdown and documentation in general (some things I read are Improving The Accessibility Of Your Markdown, Writing accessible documentation, and Alternative Text).

The Accessible SVG test page, Making SVG Accessible, Introduction to ARIA - Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and Using Font Awesome Icons in Hugo were helpful re: SVGs.

See also

• Gruvbox
• Hugoplate
• Bear Cub
• Niello
• Hextra