runtimeterror/content/posts/the-slash-page-scoop/index.md

title	date	lastmod	description	featured	toc	reply	categories	tags
The Slash Page Scoop	2024-06-02	2024-07-04T02:23:41Z	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.	false	true	true	Backstage	hugo meta

Inspired by Robb Knight's recent slash pages 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 tells a bit about me and my background
• /changelog is just starting to record some of visual/functional changes I make here
• /colophon describes the technology and services used in producing/hosting this site
• /homelab isn't a canonical slash page but it provides a lot of details about my homelab setup
• /save shamelessly hosts referral links for things I love and think you'll love too
• /uses shares the stuff I use on a regular basis

And, of course, these are collected in one place at /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 feature for that. I simply tagged each page with a new slashes category by adding it to the post's front matter:

# 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:

# 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 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:

# torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true}
{{ $pages := .Pages }}
{{ if .IsHome }}
  {{ $pages = where site.RegularPages "Type" "in" site.Params.mainSections }}
{{ end }}
<header class="content__header">
{{ if .IsHome }}
  <h1>{{ site.Params.indexTitle | markdownify }}</h1>
{{ else }}
  <h1>{{ .Title | markdownify }}{{ if eq .Kind "term" }}&nbsp;<a href="{{ .Permalink }}feed.xml" aria-label="Category RSS"><i class="fa-solid fa-square-rss"></i></a>&nbsp;</h1> <!-- [tl! ~~] -->
  {{ with .Description }}<i>{{ . }}</i><hr>{{ else }}<br>{{ end }}
{{ end }}{{ end }}
  {{ .Content }}
</header>

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:

# torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true}
{{ $pages := .Pages }}
{{ if .IsHome }}
  {{ $pages = where site.RegularPages "Type" "in" site.Params.mainSections }}
{{ end }}
<header class="content__header">
{{ if .IsHome }}
  <h1>{{ site.Params.indexTitle | markdownify }}</h1>
{{ else }}
  {{ if eq .Title "/slashes" }} <!-- [tl! **:3 ++:3 ] -->
    <h1>{{ .Title | markdownify }}</h1>
    <i>My collection of <a title="what's a slashpage?" href="https://slashpages.net">slash pages↗</a>.</i><hr>
  {{ else }}
    <h1>{{ .Title | markdownify }}{{ if eq .Kind "term" }}&nbsp;<a href="{{ .Permalink }}feed.xml" aria-label="Category RSS"><i class="fa-solid fa-square-rss"></i></a>&nbsp;</h1>
    {{ with .Description }}<i>{{ . }}</i><hr>{{ else }}<br>{{ end }}
  {{ end }} <!-- [tl! ** ++ ] -->
{{ end }}{{ end }}
  {{ .Content }}
</header>

So instead of rendering the description I defined in the front matter the archive page will show:

My collection of slash pages.

While I'm at it, I'd like for the slash pages themselves to be listed in alphabetical order rather than sorted by date (like everything else on the site). The remainder of my layouts/partials/archive.html already handles a few different ways of displaying lists of content:

# torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true}
{{- if and (eq .Kind "taxonomy") (eq .Title "Tags") }} <!-- [tl! reindex(15)] -->
  {{/* /tags/ */}}
  <div class="tagsArchive">
  {{- range $key, $value := .Site.Taxonomies }}
    {{- $slicedTags := ($value.ByCount) }}
    {{- range $slicedTags }}
      {{- if eq $key "tags"}}
        <div><a href='/{{ $key }}/{{ (replace .Name "#" "%23") | urlize }}/' title="{{ .Name }}">{{ .Name }}</a><sup>{{ .Count }}</sup></div>
      {{- end }}
    {{- end }}
  {{- end }}
  </div>
{{- else if eq .Kind "taxonomy" }}
  {{/* /categories/ */}}
  {{- $sorted := sort $pages "Title" }}
  {{- range $sorted }}
    {{- $postDate := .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    {{- $updateDate := .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    <article class="post">
      <header class="post__header">
        <h1><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a></h1>
        <p class="post__meta">
          <span class="date">["{{ with $updateDate }}{{ . }}{{ else }}{{ $postDate }}{{ end }}"]</span>
        </p>
      </header>
      <section class="post__summary">
        {{ .Description }}
      </section>
      <hr>
    </article>
  {{ end }}
{{- else }}
  {{/* regular posts archive */}}
  {{- range (.Paginate $pages).Pages }}
    {{- $postDate := .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    {{- $updateDate := .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    <article class="post">
      <header class="post__header">
        <h1><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a></h1>
        <p class="post__meta">
          <span class="date">["{{- $postDate }}"{{- if ne $postDate $updateDate }}, "{{ $updateDate }}"{{ end }}]</span>
        </p>
      </header>
      <section class="post__summary">
        {{if .Description }}{{ .Description }}{{ else }}{{ .Summary }}{{ end }}
      </section>
      <hr>
    </article>
  {{- end }}
  {{- template "_internal/pagination.html" . }}
{{- end }}

1. The /tags/ archive uses a condensed display format which simply shows the tag name and the number of posts with that tag.
2. Other taxonomy archives (like /categories) are sorted by title, displayed with a brief description, and the date that a post in the categories was published or updated.
3. Archives of posts are sorted by date (most recent first) and include the post description (or summary if it doesn't have one), and both the publish and updated dates.

I'll just tweak the second condition there to check for either a taxonomy archive or a page with the title /slashes:

# torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true}
{{- if and (eq .Kind "taxonomy") (eq .Title "Tags") }} <!-- [tl! collapse:start reindex(20)] -->
  {{/* /tags/ */}}
  <div class="tagsArchive">
  {{- range $key, $value := .Site.Taxonomies }}
    {{- $slicedTags := ($value.ByCount) }}
    {{- range $slicedTags }}
      {{- if eq $key "tags"}}
        <div><a href='/{{ $key }}/{{ (replace .Name "#" "%23") | urlize }}/' title="{{ .Name }}">{{ .Name }}</a><sup>{{ .Count }}</sup></div>
      {{- end }}
    {{- end }}
  {{- end }} <!-- [tl! collapse:end] -->
  </div>
{{- else if eq .Kind "taxonomy" }} <!-- [tl! **:3 --] -->
{{- else if or (eq .Kind "taxonomy") (eq .Title "/slashes") }} <!-- [tl! ++ reindex(-1)] -->
  {{/* /categories/ */}} <!-- [tl! --] -->
  {{/* /categories/ or /slashes/ */}} <!-- [tl! ++ reindex(-1)] -->
  {{- $sorted := sort $pages "Title" }}
  {{- range $sorted }}
    {{- $postDate := .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    {{- $updateDate := .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    <article class="post">
      <header class="post__header">
        <h1><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a></h1>
        <p class="post__meta">
          <span class="date">["{{ with $updateDate }}{{ . }}{{ else }}{{ $postDate }}{{ end }}"]</span>
        </p>
      </header>
      <section class="post__summary">
        {{ .Description }}
      </section>
      <hr>
    </article>
  {{ end }}
{{- else }} <!-- [tl! collapse:start] -->
  {{/* regular posts archive */}}
  {{- range (.Paginate $pages).Pages }}
    {{- $postDate := .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    {{- $updateDate := .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}
    <article class="post">
      <header class="post__header">
        <h1><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a></h1>
        <p class="post__meta">
          <span class="date">["{{- $postDate }}"{{- if ne $postDate $updateDate }}, "{{ $updateDate }}"{{ end }}]</span>
        </p>
      </header>
      <section class="post__summary">
        {{if .Description }}{{ .Description }}{{ else }}{{ .Summary }}{{ end }}
      </section>
      <hr>
    </article>
  {{- end }}
  {{- template "_internal/pagination.html" . }}
{{- end }} <!-- [tl! collapse:end] -->

So that's got the /slashes page looking the way I want it to. The last tweak will be to the template I use for displaying related (ie, in the same category) posts in the sidebar. The magic for that happens in layouts/partials/aside.html:

# torchlight! {"lineNumbers":true}
{{ if .Params.description }}<p>{{ .Params.description }}</p><hr>{{ end }} <!-- [tl! collapse:start] -->
{{ if and (gt .WordCount 400 ) (gt (len .TableOfContents) 180) }}
<p>
  <h3>On this page</h3>
  {{ .TableOfContents }}
  <hr>
</p>
{{ end }} <!-- [tl! collapse:end] -->

{{ if isset .Params "categories" }} <!--[tl! **:start] -->
{{$related := where .Site.RegularPages ".Params.categories" "eq" .Params.categories }}
{{- $relatedLimit := default 8 .Site.Params.numberOfRelatedPosts }}
{{ if eq .Params.categories "slashes" }} <!-- [tl! ++:10] -->
<h3>More /slashes</h3>
{{ $sortedPosts := sort $related "Title" }}
<ul>
  {{- range $sortedPosts }}
  <li>
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" title="{{ .Title }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a>
  </li>
  {{ end }}
</ul>
{{ else }}
<h3>More {{ .Params.categories }}</h3>
<ul>
  {{- range first $relatedLimit $related }}
  <li>
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" title="{{ .Title }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a>
  </li>
  {{ end }}
  {{ if gt (len $related) $relatedLimit }}
  <li>
    <a href="/categories/{{ lower .Params.categories }}/"><i>See all {{ .Params.categories }}</i></a>
  </li>
  {{ end }}
</ul>
{{ end }} <!-- [tl! ++ **:end] -->
<hr>
{{ end }}

{{- $posts := where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "in" .Site.Params.mainSections }} <!-- [tl! collase:12] -->
{{- $featured := default 8 .Site.Params.numberOfFeaturedPosts }}
{{- $featuredPosts := first $featured (where $posts "Params.featured" true)}}
{{- with $featuredPosts }}
<h3>Featured Posts</h3>
<ul>
  {{- range . }}
  <li>
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" title="{{ .Title }}">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</a>
  </li>
  {{- end }}
</ul>
{{- end }}

So now if you visit any of my slash pages (like, say, /colophon) you'll see the alphabetized list of other slash pages in the side bar.

Closing

I'll probably keep tweaking these slash pages in the coming days, but for now I'm really glad to finally have them posted. I've only thinking about doing this for the past six months.