I’ve been a user of Micro.blog since 2018. At first, I wasn’t sure I would like the place. Eventually, it grew on me because it is such a quiet place1, with more engagement from the community members and with much more respect. There is something that I don’t like about Micro.blog, though. It’s the lack of easy control over the visual appearance of my blog.

Micro.blog is based on Hugo, a static site generator. It’s pretty flexible, fast and open-source. My current understanding of Micro.blog is that it doesn’t expose all of Hugo’s controls, only a subset of them. I’m ok with this, as Hugo is not for the faint of heart. Yet, I’m not ok with the look of my microblog. I want to make it more personal, less like a generic website based on a frequently used visual theme. To make changes, I need to know about HTML (I’m kind of okay with this) and CSS (I’m not okay with this!). CSS is the weirdest thing I have ever encountered in my digital life. What a messy “language”2. No amount of reading or YouTube videos will make it understandable for me.

Another solution would be to import an already-made Hugo theme in Hugo. The other issue with Micro.blog is that it isn’t easy to import open-source Hugo-based themes. They need to be “ported”. Again, it’s not something I want to mess with. I recently started to think that maybe it was time to have my own microblog hosted somewhere to get complete control of the visual appearance. Installing Hugo on my M1-based Mac mini is simple. Having a publishing pipeline from my machine to the web looks pretty easy, too. It’s only the beginning. Even with great articles like this one, I find it difficult to wrap my head around it.

After much reading, I changed my mind and settled on the “Hyde” theme of Micro.blog. I would lose too much if I were to be alone, and new challenges would certainly arise. I hope for Micro.blog to keep evolving, especially in the area of better customization. I asked its founder to open up its roadmap. I’m anxiously waiting to see what’s next.

  1. Compared to Twitter. ↩︎

  2. Not a language but a formalism for visual rendering of content. ↩︎