Spent some time building my custom theme for Micro.blog with Claude Code. It works but the nature of Hugo processing with different templates complicates the process. What works on the main timeline won’t always work on individual posts. Lot’s of back and forth to test and fix things. The good thing is that I’m building exactly what I want.

You can see the current design right here.

Another milestone accomplished: I now have a basic custom theme installed on my Micro.blog test website. It’s not a plugin per se; it’s a custom theme stored on my GitHub account that Micro.blog fetches. I don’t yet know how to turn it into a plugin with version numbering and all that, but I might not need that after all. I just wish Micro.blog would update automatically whenever I push a new change to my repo, like Vercel does.

Continuing my thinking about a custom-built Micro.blog theme plugin, I wondered why most of Micro.blog themes design card-based? Here’s Claude AI’s answer:

Cards became the dominant Micro.blog theme style largely by following a broader web design trend from the mid-2010s, when Pinterest and Material Design made cards ubiquitous. Theme authors adopted them because they handle variable-length content safely and look great in screenshots. The fork-from-fork nature of many Micro.blog themes then perpetuated the pattern. The irony is that cards aren’t actually the best fit for Micro.blog’s typical stream of short title-less posts — making it a real opportunity for anyone wanting a distinctive, better-suited design.

Besides the fact that Micro.blog launched in 2018, the rest of Claude’s response makes me think that my design choice of a left sidebar, similar to Micro, is a good one.