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Configuring my Congo themed Hugo blog to use Openring

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I really like Drew DeVault’s Openring, an elegant utility that generates links to blogs that I follow under my posts (scroll to the end of this article, you may find something you like!). In this post I’d like to walk you through how I set up Openring with my Congo themed Hugo blog.

Configuring Openring #

Openring takes in a Go templated HTML file (see the official example) as well as the feeds you want to display as arguments, and produces a filled out template as a result. I first wrote a simple script that stuffed a file containing a list of RSS feeds into the correct arguments needed to run openring:

# openring.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash

FEEDLIST=config/openring/feeds.txt
INPUT_TEMPLATE=config/openring/openring_template.html
OUTPUT=layouts/partials/openring.html

readarray -t FEEDS < $FEEDLIST

# populated below
OPENRING_ARGS=""

for FEED in "${FEEDS[@]}"
do
   OPENRING_ARGS="$OPENRING_ARGS -s $FEED"
done

openring $OPENRING_ARGS < $INPUT_TEMPLATE > $OUTPUT

This snippet reads a list of feeds and a template living in config/openring/ and spits out a Hugo partial template containing the populated list of articles in the layouts/partials directory.

My Openring template is a tweaked version of the example provided on the Openring repo. My tweaks center around playing nicely with the Congo theme which uses Tailwind for styling.

<section class="webring">
    <h3>Articles from blogs I follow around the net:</h3>
    <section class="flex flex-wrap">
        {{range .Articles}}
        <div class="article flex flex-col m-1 p-1 bg-neutral-300 dark:bg-neutral-600">
            <h4 class="m-0">
                <a href="{{.Link}}" target="_blank" rel="noopener">{{.Title}}</a>
            </h4>
            <p class="summary">{{.Summary}}</p>
            <small>
                via <a href="{{.SourceLink}}">{{.SourceTitle}}</a>
            </small>
            <small>{{.Date | datef "January 2, 2006"}}</small>
        </div>
        {{end}}
    </section>
    <p class="text-sm text-neutral-500 dark:text-neutral-400 text-right">
        Generated by
        <a href="https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring">openring</a>
    </p>
</section>
{{/* For the bits I couldn't figure out how to represent in Tailwind */}}
<style>
    .webring .article {
        flex: 1 1 0;
        min-width: 10rem;
    }
    .webring .summary {
        flex: 1 1 0;
        font-size: 0.8rem;
    }
</style>

Loading in the generated Openring template #

Depending on your theme, the process of injecting your Openring template will differ. I’m using Congo, which specifies that a custom partial can be injected into the footer of all pages simply by naming it layouts/partials/extend-footer.html. This isn’t perfect, as I only want my Openring partial to be loaded on articles, excluding pages like my homepage, but luckily Hugo’s template syntax makes this easy to fix by using the .IsPage field:

{{/* layouts/partials/extend-footer.html */}}
{{/* Don't load the partial if it doesn't exist */}}
{{ if templates.Exists "partials/openring.html" }}
    {{ if .IsPage }}
        {{/* Only display at the bottom of articles */}}
        <div class="mt-6">
            {{ partial "openring.html" . }}
        </div>
    {{ end }}
{{ end }}

Now running the previously described script openring.sh followed by hugo serve should produce the results we’re looking for!

Tying it all together #

Next, I made a simple makefile that pipelines openring.sh before running any relevant Hugo commands:

# Makefile

openring:
	./openring.sh

serve: openring
	hugo serve -p 8080

build: openring
	hugo

build-prod: openring
	hugo --minify

Now in my deployment instead of running hugo --minify I simply run hugo build-prod.

If you’d like to see the final state of my Hugo site after making these changes, check here as a reference.