Solar v.2

• Rebuild of Low-tech Magazine's Solar theme with Hugo
• Builds the entire site in minutes rather than hours :)
• Makes use of additional taxonomies that are possible in Hugo

Requires Hugo 0.10x or newer!

Local Development

hugo server

Organizing content

Content is organized as Hugo Page Bundles.

That means that each post is a directory which contains:

• the article (index.md)
• the translations (index.lang.md)
• the images in the article (images/)
• dithered versions of the images (images/dithers/)
• comments in various languages (comments.en.md)

Example:

how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet/
├── comments.en.md
├── images
│   ├── air-jaldi-epostman.png
│   ├── dithers
│   │   ├── air-jaldi-epostman_dithered.png
│   │   ├── freifunk-wifi-node_dithered.png
│   │   ├── node-air-jaldi-network_dithered.png
│   │   ├── node-spanish-guifi-network_dithered.png
│   │   ├── node-tegola_dithered.png
│   │   ├── sneakernet-on-rails_dithered.png
│   │   ├── tegola-project-low-tech-internet_dithered.png
│   │   ├── wifi-link_dithered.png
│   │   └── wireless-links-spanish-guifi-network_dithered.png
│   ├── freifunk-wifi-node.jpg
│   ├── node-air-jaldi-network.png
│   ├── node-spanish-guifi-network.png
│   ├── node-tegola.jpg
│   ├── sneakernet-on-rails.jpg
│   ├── tegola-project-low-tech-internet.png
│   ├── wifi-link.jpg
│   └── wireless-links-spanish-guifi-network.jpg
├── index.de.md
├── index.en.md
├── index.es.md
└── index.fr.md

At least one article is required: index.md or index.lang.md.

Formatting articles

The design relies on the following front matter fields:

---
title: "How to Build a Low-tech Internet"
date: "2015-10-26"
summary: "If we want the internet to keep working in circumstances where access to energy is more limited, we can learn important lessons from alternative network technologies."
slug: "how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet"
lang: "en"
authors: ["Kris De Decker" ]
categories: ["Low-tech Solutions"]
tags: ["ICT" ]
featured_image: "tegola-project-low-tech-internet.png"
draft: false
---

In the case of a translation you can specify the translators as well:

!! Careful, only some metadata should to be translated, the other needs to be left intact.

Specifically, the metadata keys (title, date, summary etc.) should remain intact wheras the metadata values can be translated (such as the contents of title or summary).

However do not translate the values of slug, categories, tags and featured_image.

---
title: "Cómo construir una Internet de Baja Tecnología" #TO TRANSLATE
date: "2015-10-26"
summary: "Si queremos que internet siga funcionando en circunstancias en que el acceso a la energía es más limitado, entonces podemos aprender lecciones importantes de las tecnologías de red alternativas." #TO TRANSLATE
slug: "how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet"
lang: "es" #ADD THE CORRECT LANG code (fr, es, etc.)
authors: ["Kris De Decker" ]
categories: ["Low-tech Solutions"]
tags: ["ICT" ] 
featured_image: "tegola-project-low-tech-internet.png"
translators: ["Colectivo Disonancia"] #ADD TRANSLATOR FOR THIS LANGUAGE
draft: False
---

To add several authors or several tags, we use the following syntax:

---
authors: ["Kris De Decker","Marie Verdeil" ]
tags: ["ICT", "another tag", "another other tag"]
---

Image shortcodes

The design relies on shortcodes for images rather than markdown image tags:

{{% figure src="yutampo2.png" %}} Una borsa d’acqua calda giapponese detta yutampo, fatta di plastica rigida. Fonte: All About Japan. [https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/6244/](https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/6244/) {{% /figure %}}

Reader comments

If there are any comments to be rendered under an article they should be in a file called comments.lang.md and each comment rendered as such:

{{< comment name="Lord Byron" >}}
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd” 
{{</ comment >}}

Internal links

To link to other articles on the solar website, we use a hugo specific shortcode to call the article folder. This has several advantages:

1. The url will not break if the article title or date change, since we are calling the file itself.
2. When used in a transaltion, the shortcode automatically points to the translated article, if it exists, or defaults to english.

• Sytnax:

[Text]({{< ref "/path-to-folder" >}})

• Examples:

[Donate]({{< ref "/donate" >}})
[here]({{< ref "/posts/power-water-networks/" >}})

Author & Translator pages

This site builds custom taxonomies for Authors and Translators which can be accessed via http://localhost:1313/authors/ and http://localhost:1313/translators/ respectively. Individual data about each author or translator can be written in content/authors/authorname/index.md

Additional utilities

In utils there are various utilities to be used before or after site rendering.

dithering tool

dither_images.py recursively traverses folders and creates dithered versions of the images it finds. These are stored in the same folder as the images in a folder called "dithers".

Installation & Depedencies

depends on Pillow and hitherdither

pip install Pillow git+https://www.github.com/hbldh/hitherdither

Usage

Dither all the images found in the subdirectories of content python3 utils/dither_images.py --directory content/

Colorize the dithers as well based on the LTM categories: python3 utils/dither_images.py --directory content/ --colorize

Run the script with more debug output: python3 utils/dither_images.py --directory content/ --colorize --verbose

Remove all dithered files in the subdirectories of content: python3 utils/dither_images.py --remove --directory content/

Page Size Calculator

This script recursively traverses folders and enumerates the file size of all html pages and associated media. The calculated total file size is then added to the HTML page. The script looks for a div with class page-size to add the page metadata in to. This div is currently found in layouts/partials/footer.html

Installation & Dependencies

Relies on BeautifulSoup

pip install bs4

Usage

This script should be run after the site has been generated on the resulting files. It is a post-processing step. In the case of Hugo, this is usually the directory called public. Add the baseurl that you also use in production:

python3 utils/calculate_size.py --directory public/ --baseURL https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com

build_site.sh

This is a script to build the hugo site and run the various support scripts. It assumes you generate and deploy the site on the same machine.

It can be used in cron to make a daily build at 12:15 and log the output.

15 12 * * * /bin/bash /path/to/repo/utils/build_site.sh > /path/to/build.log 2>&1

Contributions

The Solar v.2 theme was made by

• Marie Otsuka¹
• Roel Roscam Abbing¹
• Marie Verdeil

With contributions by

• Erhard Maria Klein

Donations

If Low-Tech Magazine or this theme has been useful to your work, please support us by making a one time donation through Paypal or a recurring one through Patreon

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1. Marie and Roel created the original Pelican theme for the first version of https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com ↩︎