--- title: "The Slash Page Scoop" date: 2024-05-30 # lastmod: 2024-05-30 draft: true description: "I've added new slash pages to the site to share some background info on who I am, what I use, and how this site works." featured: false toc: true reply: true categories: Backstage tags: - hugo - meta --- Inspired by [Robb Knight](https://rknight.me/)'s recent [slash pages](https://slashpages.net/) site, I spent some time over the past week or two drafting some slash pages of my own. > Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like `/now`, `/about`, or `/uses`. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb. On a blog that is otherwise organized in a fairly chronological manner, slash pages provide a way share information out-of-band. I think they're great for more static content (like an about page that says who I am) as well as for content that may be regularly updated (like a changelog). The pages that I've implemented (so far) include: - [/about](/about) tells a bit about me and my background - [/changelog](/changelog) is just *starting* to record some of visual/functional changes I make here - [/colophon](/colophon) describes the technology and services used in producing/hosting this site - [/homelab](/homelab) isn't a canonical slash page but it provides a lot of details about my homelab setup - [/save](/save) shamelessly hosts referral links for things I love and think you'll love too - [/uses](/uses) shares the stuff I use on a regular basis And, of course, these are collected in one place at [/slashes](/slashes). Feel free to stop here if you just want to check out the slash pages, or keep on reading for some nerd stuff about how I implemented them on my Hugo site. ### Implementation All of my typical blog posts get created within the site's Hugo directory under `content/posts/`, like this one at `content/posts/the-slash-page-scoop/index.md`. They get indexed, automatically added to the list of posts on the home page, and show up in the RSS feed. I don't want my slash pages to get that treatment so I made them directly inside the `content` directory: ``` content ├── categories ├── posts ├── search ├── 404.md ├── _index.md ├── about.md [tl! ~~] ├── changelog.md [tl! ~~] ├── colophon.md [tl! ~~] ├── homelab.md [tl! ~~] ├── save.md [tl! ~~] ├── simplex.md └── uses.md [tl! ~~] ``` Easy enough, but I didn't then want to have to worry about manually updating a list of slash pages so I used [Hugo's Taxonomies](https://gohugo.io/content-management/taxonomies/) feature for that. I simply tagged each page with a new `slashes` category by adding it to the post's front matter: ```yaml # torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true} --- title: "/changelog" date: "2024-05-26" lastmod: "2024-05-30" description: "Maybe I should keep a log of all my site-related tinkering?" categories: slashes # [tl! ~~] --- ``` {{% notice note "Category Names" %}} I really wanted to name the category `/slashes`, but that seems to trip up Hugo a bit when it comes to creating an archive of category posts. So I settled for `slashes` and came up with some workarounds to make it present the way I wanted. {{% /notice %}} Hugo will automatically generate an archive page for a given taxonomy term (so a post tagged with the category `slashes` would be listed at `$BASE_URL/category/slashes/`), but I like to have a bit of control over how those archive pages are actually presented. So I create a new file at `content/categories/slashes/_index.md` and drop in this front matter: ```yaml # torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true} --- title: /slashes url: /slashes aliases: - /categories/slashes description: > My collection of slash pages. --- ``` The `slashes` in the file path tells Hugo which taxonomy it belongs to and so it can match the appropriately-categorized posts. Just like with normal posts, the `title` field defines the title (duh) of the post; this way I can label the archive page as `/slashes` instead of just `slashes`. The `url` field lets me override where the page will be served, and I added `/categories/slashes` as an alias so that anyone who hits that canonical URL will be automatically redirected. Setting a `description` lets me choose what introductory text will be displayed at the top of the index page, as well as when it's shown at the next higher level archive (like `/categories/`). Of course, I'd like to include a link to [slashpages.net](https://slashpages.net) to provide a bit more info about what these pages are, and I can't add hyperlinks to the description text. What I *can* do is edit the template which is used for rendering the archive page. In my case, that's at `layouts/partials/archive.html`, and it starts out like this: ```jinja-html # torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true} {{ $pages := .Pages }} {{ if .IsHome }} {{ $pages = where site.RegularPages "Type" "in" site.Params.mainSections }} {{ end }}
{{ if .IsHome }}

{{ site.Params.indexTitle | markdownify }}

{{ else }}

{{ .Title | markdownify }}{{ if eq .Kind "term" }}  

{{ with .Description }}{{ . }}
{{ else }}
{{ end }} {{ end }}{{ end }} {{ .Content }}
``` Line 9 is where I had already modified the template to conditionally add an RSS link for category archive pages. I'm going to tweak the setup a bit to conditionally render designated text when the page `.Title` matches `/slashes`: ```jinja-html # torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true} {{ $pages := .Pages }} {{ if .IsHome }} {{ $pages = where site.RegularPages "Type" "in" site.Params.mainSections }} {{ end }}
{{ if .IsHome }}

{{ site.Params.indexTitle | markdownify }}

{{ else }} {{ if eq .Title "/slashes" }}

{{ .Title | markdownify }}

My collection of slash pages.
{{ else }}

{{ .Title | markdownify }}{{ if eq .Kind "term" }}  

{{ with .Description }}{{ . }}
{{ else }}
{{ end }} {{ end }} {{ end }}{{ end }} {{ .Content }}
``` So instead of rendering the `description` I defined in the front matter the archive page will show: > *My collection of [slash pages](https://slashpages.net).* While I'm at it, I'd like for the posts themselves to be listed in alphabetical order rather than sorted by date. So here's how the rest of my existing `archive.html` partial template handles displaying posts: ```jinja-html # torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true} {{- if eq .Kind "taxonomy" }} {{- if eq .Title "Tags" }}
{{- range $key, $value := .Site.Taxonomies }} {{- $slicedTags := ($value.ByCount) }} {{- range $slicedTags }} {{- if eq $key "tags"}}
{{ .Name }}{{ .Count }}
{{- end }} {{- end }} {{- end }}
{{- else }} {{- range .Pages.ByDate.Reverse }} {{- $postDate := .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }} {{- $updateDate := .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}

{{ .Title | markdownify }}

["{{- $postDate }}"{{- if ne $postDate $updateDate }}, "{{ $updateDate }}"{{ end }}]

{{ .Description }}
{{ end }} {{- end }} {{- else }} {{- range (.Paginate $pages).Pages }} {{- $postDate := .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }} {{- $updateDate := .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}

{{ .Title | markdownify }}

["{{- $postDate }}"{{- if ne $postDate $updateDate }}, "{{ $updateDate }}"{{ end }}]

{{ .Summary }}
{{- end }} {{- template "_internal/pagination.html" . }} {{- end }} ``` Basically: if it's the [tags](/tags/) archive page, it will list out all the tags in a compact way. If it's some other taxonomy page,