Introducing Indigo

Indigo is a lightweight theme for Hugo with IndieWeb features baked in. It’s great for longer-form blogging, placing its focus on distraction-free reading and beautiful typefaces.

I’ve been working on this theme since August, when I relaunched this site as a blog using a pre-release version of the theme. I’m happy to say that it’s finally ready for public release.

(My own site runs a custom fork of Indigo—mostly custom CSS—but I’ve yet to update it with all the goodies from the official version. Cobbler’s kids, and all that.)

IndieWeb features

A key feature of this theme is its support for IndieWeb features, including microformats and web sign-in.

Web sign-in

Indigo handles web sign-in by setting the authorization_endpoint to IndieAuth.com:

IndieAuth.com is part of the IndieWeb movement to take back control of your online identity. Instead of logging in to websites as “you on Twitter” or “you on Facebook”, you should be able to log in as just “you”.

This allows you to sign in to certain services simply by providing your site’s domain name.

microformats

Indigo marks up content with appropriate microformats, which provides semantic definitions of your content to other software. Posts are marked up with h-entry classes, like p-name, p-author, and e-content, while the author bio is marked up with h-card classes, including u-photo, u-url, p-locality/p-country-name, and p-note.

Open typefaces

Indigo uses a combination of three beautiful typefaces to render your words.

• Fira Sans for heading text
• Charter for body text
• Fira Code for monospaced text

Licenses are included in the theme’s static/fonts folder.

Have a look at a couple of paragraphs of placeholder text using the wonderfully readable Charter:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer eleifend nulla ac elit venenatis posuere. Sed id aliquam arcu, et malesuada lectus. Donec et dignissim massa. Pellentesque in laoreet nibh. Pellentesque sagittis, libero quis vestibulum aliquam, ante risus imperdiet magna, at ornare dolor libero quis nunc. Donec quis tempus purus. Cras ornare magna ac facilisis tristique. Nulla aliquet purus quis massa rutrum interdum ac at magna. Cras fermentum magna id orci viverra facilisis. Ut vitae lobortis nisl.

Sed interdum tincidunt venenatis. Sed hendrerit dictum nisi, at dignissim orci consectetur quis. Aenean sed nisl et nisl placerat euismod. Proin hendrerit nulla at rhoncus molestie. Cras eu gravida erat, vestibulum ornare diam. Praesent nunc arcu, ultrices et risus sed, dictum mattis dui. Maecenas vitae nisl at massa porta pellentesque. Donec eget urna eget nisl imperdiet scelerisque eget a mauris. Nam fringilla sem id vehicula rhoncus. Curabitur tincidunt massa mauris, facilisis placerat odio eleifend sit amet. Etiam nec vehicula sapien, at dignissim risus. Sed elit erat, lacinia eu vulputate at, semper eu nulla. Quisque a urna sed nulla viverra egestas nec quis nunc. Curabitur iaculis elit in orci sollicitudin suscipit.

And code snippets look great with Fira Code:

<article>
    <header>
    {{ if .Title }}
    <h2 class="list-title"><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a></h2>
    {{ end }}
    <p class="list-post-date">
        <time datetime="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" | safeHTML }}">
        {{ .PublishDate.Format "2 January, 2006 at 15:04 MST" }}
        </time>
    </p>
    </header>
    <div>
    {{ .Summary | plainify | safeHTML }}
    </div>
    {{ if .Truncated }}
    <p><a class="read-more" href="{{ .Permalink }}">Read more &rarr;</a></p>
    {{ end }}
</article>

Contributions welcome

Indigo is distributed under the MIT license, so feel free to fork the repository and make it your own! If you’ve got ideas on how to improve the theme, let me know by opening an issue in GitHub — but please be sure to review the documentation on contributing.