Hitchens theme for Micro.blog

Several days ago I logged into Micro.blog for the first time in a few months. After a bit of scrolling to catch up, I was pleasantly surprised to see I had been mentioned in a conversation between @sod and @pimoore where @sod mentioned he and his girlfriend had been using my Hitchens theme for Jekyll for their book blog, Läslöss. Check it out! It’s a very cool modification of Hitchens. Since releasing the theme, I’ve slowly been compiling a list of cool Hitchens mods that I intend to publish here, but that’s for a future post.

This post is about how @sod’s post led to my discovery that developer Pete Moore (@pimoore on Micro.blog) had recently developed and released a version of the Hitchens theme for Micro.blog! Along with a few tweaks to the theme’s form and function, Pete was able to port my Jekyll theme to Hugo, the software that powers every blog hosted on Micro.blog. And from what I’ve seen over the last few days, people are really digging it!

Back in 2019 when I was first developing Hitchens, I got a really nice mention from Micro.blog founder Manton Reese indicating his interest in having Hitchens ported for use on Micro.blog. I tried a year later to start the work of porting it to Hugo and Micro.blog, but unfortunately other things came up.

By initially releasing the Hitchens theme under an MIT open source license, I created the opportunity for any other developer to build off of my work. On Github, the project has been forked almost two hundred times and, as mentioned above, I’ve seen some really great modifications of the theme over the last two years. (Follow my blog by email, Micro.blog, or RSS to be notified when I post that mods post 😃)

This is the first time software I’ve released has been taken and ported to an entirely different platform and I am honoured that Pete did such a great job of maintaining the spirit of the original theme. If my blog was hosted on Micro.blog, there’s a very strong chance I’d be giving his version of Hitchens a spin.

If your blog is hosted on Micro.blog, check out the Hitchens theme for Micro.blog. And if you’re interested in blogging and aren’t sure where to start, I highly recommend checking out the tools and supportive community Micro.blog has to offer.

※