June 2025 Theme Updates

Last month, I made a few little contributions to the Sumo theme my blogs use:

Thanks Matt Langford for accepting my little PRs to make the theme a little bit better, in maybe ways that other people don’t care about, but matter to me.

One of the things I love about Micro.blog is that Manton continually ships new features and sometimes makes videos to show them off:

A short 1-minute video on YouTube showing today’s update to Micro.blog for iOS. Android update coming later this week to match. I just wanted to highlight the different parts of the UI for publishing a draft blog post.

This is how you keep technical customers engaged and up to speed about what’s new in apps. 🙌

Testing Micro.blog theme changes locally on macOS

Developers commonly get hung up on setting up the perfect blog before actually blogging. I avoided that temptation by using Micro.blog, which makes it really easy to get started and not be fussy with custom code.

That said, I now want to make some improvements to the default theme (Sumo) that I use on my blogs.

Here’s how I got a fork of the theme running locally with the content from one of my blogs.

First, shout-out to Stephen Bowling for posting his approach to running Hugo locally.

I downloaded the hugo_0.117.0_darwin-universal.tar.gz release of Hugo from GitHub: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/tag/v0.117.0

After moving the hugo binary to /usr/local/bin/, I ran this command to bypass the macOS security gatekeeper:

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /usr/local/bin/hugo

Next, I went into my Micro.blog account and clicked on Posts, then in the ··· menu, I clicked Export. From there, I downloaded the “Export theme and Markdown (.zip) — to use in Hugo.” I opened the ZIP file and renamed it web.chasen.dev.

In that folder, I deleted the layouts/ folder (so my theme changes could apply).

In that folder, I created a themes/ folder. More on that in a moment.

I have Micro.blog archive my content, so I downloaded the uploads folder from my archive and copied it into the static/ folder.

I said at the beginning that I wanted to make changes to the Sumo-Theme. I forked that repo in GitHub and then cloned it into the themes folder I made a moment ago.

I also cloned theme-blank into that folder, so now the themes folder has those two repos inside it. This is required because the “blank” theme provides some partials that are required for building your site.

Now we can get cooking–to run Hugo and have it use the two repos we cloned, I run this command in my web.chasen.dev folder:

hugo server --themesDir=themes --theme=Sumo-Theme,theme-blank -D

Your site should build and be available at http://localhost:1313/

Now, I can make changes to Sumo-Theme and, with the Hugo server running, my site is rebuilt and I can preview the changes locally. Success!