Miniflux on Janusworx

My Custom CSS for Miniflux

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:10:13 +0530

Various bits and bobs, I gradually accumulated over the past couple of years, to make my self hosted Miniflux look just the way I want it.

Width and Size
#

Changed the width to 850 pixels wide, because even on my vertical monitor, there was quite a bit of wasted horizontal space. Changed the body to use a slightly smaller size.

body {
 max-width: 850px; !important;
 font-size: 90%;
}

Italic Blockquotes
#

Changed blockquotes to be italic, so that they’re better set off against normal body text.
Also made them a wee bit tinier than the body.

article > blockquote {
 font-size: 87.5%;
 font-style: italic
}

Smaller title size
#

If you follow Tumblr blogs as I do¹, you know they have Tumblr Asks.
The asks themselves become the title of an RSS entry, when the author responds to one.
And long asks lead to long titles.
So here’s a bit of CSS to make the font smaller than the default H1 size.

.entry-header>h1 {
 font-size: 1em !important;
}

Even at this size, the titles get a bit unwieldy at times (below), but this much I can live with.

Disable Tag Visibility
#

Miniflux displays tags, if it detects them on certain posts.
I don’t read them. I don’t need them. It breaks my next-next-clicky-next chain of continuity by pushing the next post link below, making me move my mouse². So I killed them!

.entry-tags {
 display: none;
}

In Summary
#

So, all the flotsam and jetsam above, go into a box that says “Custom CSS” at the very bottom of the Settings page. Putting it all together we have …

body {
 /*set width*/
 max-width: 850px; !important;
 font-size: 90%;
}


article > blockquote {
 font-size: 87.5%;
 font-style: italic
}


.entry-header>h1 {
 font-size: 1em !important;
}


.entry-tags {
 display: none;
}

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Hello, Ursula Vernon, Diane Duane, Peter Morwood & Neil Gaiman! ↩︎
Oh, the troubles I face, I tell you! ↩︎

Miniflux Now Supports Custom CSS?

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:23:57 +0530

I use Miniflux as my feed reader, and I love it to bits.
It does what I need, it does it fast and it stays out of the way.

Well, almost.
I have a couple of those—whatchacalit—firehose feeds.
And I keep skimming through them by clicking next, next, next on each page.

Like so,

Except for when there is no next under my pointer.

It’d happen quite frequently and I’d have to keep moving my mouse to find the link. The whole thing was driving me batty!¹
And then it hit me. Sometimes the headlines would be too long and stretch across two lines, causing rest of the page to shift down to accomodate them.

What if I could reduce the size of the title headlines? That’d help keep it to one line and give me my next button consistently in place.
I didn’t want to go wrangle with custom stylesheets.² I grumbled a bit about Miniflux not letting me do this, before I thought, I ought to go give the settings a look see. I found a Google Reader API in one of the recent releases.³ Maybe it’d let me do something with CSS too.
And lo and behold!
Miniflux does in fact have support for custom CSS. It has in fact, had it since 2020!⁴

A tiny bit of twiddling to make my headlines smaller.

.entry-header>h1 {
 font-size: 1.2em !important;
}

I put this in the Custom CSS box in the main Settings section.

And the next link stays put under my mouse pointer, letting me rapidly skim my feeds :)

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Yes, I can (and do) use the keyboard shortcuts. But my RSI ridden wrists need constant entertainment and movement. So I switch it up frequently. ↩︎
I did try. And failed miserably. ↩︎
Helped Reeder, my iOS feed reader talk much better to Miniflux ↩︎
I’ve been a blind bat, as usual ↩︎

All About the Move to Hugo

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 13 May 2022 20:00:00 +0530

I finally got done, moving the blog from Nikola to Hugo today.
I already wrote about why I did it.
These are a few more thoughts about what went into the endeavour; and some colophonesque details.

One, really small hope, is that it will help me learn Go.
The DevOps world that I now seek to enter, speaks Go.
I also, now run two Go programs that are indispensible to me, Hugo and Miniflux.
And being the control freak, that I am, I’d love to tweak them to just how I like it.
Nikola did help learn me Python, after all.

Speaking of Nikola, I’ve used it for close to four years now, until I moved.
I was a refugee from a self hosted Ghost install. ¹
I love it to death.
It’s done all I’ve asked of it … and more.
And it’s been fast and stable all these years.
The community (primarily Chris) have been kind and patient and really helpful.
Chris and Roberto and the rest of the gang, have built something rugged and enduring.

So other than having something fun to do while I was down in the dumps, why did I move to Hugo?
I like to learn by reading.
So other than practicing Go, the best way to learn it would be to read code.
And what better place to read code, than that of the tool I use to write? ²

Another point, is that I probably outgrew what Nikola gave me out of the box, and customizing it (and learning how to) was something that I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around.
While Hugo is probably the same way and its documentation is not quite as structured as Nikola’s, it is pretty popular and I can get answers to what I want to do, really, really quickly. ³
And Hugo has an awesome book, to learn from.

So, how did the move go?

I wrote a tiny bespoke Python script, ⁴ to convert all my Nikola front matter to Hugo front matter.
That took me half a day, but it converted 677 posts, that I was dreading, I’d have to do by hand and would take me weeks.
I wrote another bespoke script to convert some gnarly tags that Hugo choked on.
And just like that, my biggest boulder just fell into place.
That left me free to write a couple of what Hugo calls, Shortcodes, to ease my writing.
I started with shortcode (a custom horizontal rule) and ended up with four! ⁵
I customised the base as well as the theme’s config to make the site look like I wanted it; (from its various options.)
And I added some custom CSS, to have custom horizontal rule and footnote styles, change the look of the links in the menu up top, style my subscribe form, and
Included the beautiful font you are reading this in.

In a word, slow, steady, iterative progress until I was done.

And who and what inspired me and who do I owe gratitude to?

Priyanka Saggu, for egging me on to do this project.
Bhavin Gandhi turned me onto the awesomeness that was Hugo.
Pradyun Gedam for making me green with envy, with his minimalistic blog and the thoughtful touches he made. ⁶
Navendu Pottekkat, whose code, ~~I stole~~ helped me style my subscribe page.
Bjørn Erik Pedersen and Steve Francia and the rest of the gang, for making Hugo
Aditya Telange, for the making the pretty, pretty, little PaperMod theme.
Kushal Das, for sharing my love of typography and beating me to a custom font on his website.
Matthew Butterick, for the gorgeousness, that is Valkyrie. The site originally used the beautiful Charter, but while it looked fetching on Windows and MacOS, it would not render as nicely on Linux machines. ⁷
With Valkyrie, that no longer is the case. I have something beautiful to look at, all day! ⁸
Robin Williams, for teaching me all about CRAP and everthing I know about type and design.

They decided to move their editor away from being purely Markdown. I get why they did it. But it just wasn’t for me. I wanted something simple. ↩︎
sorta kinda, like learning about cars, by looking under the hood of your own car, like in the old days ↩︎
even with something as weird and esoteric as the site refusing to build, because of emacs crapping in the content folder ↩︎
related post coming later … ↩︎
the aforementioned horizontal rule, two to center images and captions and one for my subscription ask at the bottom of the post. ↩︎
Nearly everything I did here, I cribbed from his blog config ↩︎
which ofcourse, is where I spend my entire day. ↩︎
I was hesitant to plonk down the money for Valkyrie. But I forgot all about that, once I saw my words rendered in the font. So, I am chalking this down to an investment. Besides Matthew’s prices are value for money (I’m just a little broke at the moment, hence the quibbling) and his usage license is generous. ↩︎

Miniflux Service Fails to Start at Boot

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 14 May 2020 08:44:19 +0530

Pleased as punch, with my Miniflux instance.
RSS, is how I catch up with everything newsy and techy and with what people I want to hear from, have to say.
I love it.

I did face one teensy issue with it though.
Every time I rebooted my machine, the Miniflux service would fail to start.
I would just manually do a systemctl restart miniflux and it would start right up, with that innocent doggy face.

image courtesy, Beverly & Pack, on Flickr

The last few days however, it’s been niggling me no end, because I have been rebooting the box ever so often.
Only when I go check up on RSS, at the end of the day or in the morning, do I realise something’s off.
So I checked up on Miniflux today, with a systemctl status miniflux
And I saw,

May 14 04:52:40 minmachine miniflux[706]: 
[FATAL] You must run the SQL migrations, 
the database schema is not up to date: current=v0 expected=v28

That did not sound right.
I religiously do a migrations step, every time it’s needed.

And then the penny dropped.
The current version of the schema, according to the error, was v0
That was not at all in line, with what I used to see, whenever I migrated.
It used to run from v25 to v26 to whatever. (These are not the actual numbers, I’m just pulling them out of my ass :P)
Not v0

It struck me that Miniflux might be starting up, before the database it uses, does.
So I just modified my Miniflux systemd script¹ to startup after the database.
Like so …

[Unit]
Description=Miniflux Service
Requires=postgresql.service
After=network-online.target postgresql.service

Disable service, enable service, reboot system to check if all is well, and all that jazz …
And et voilà! Problem solved!
Miniflux and me, sitting in a tree … h-a-p-p-i-e-e!

I use the helpful script miniflux.service from the docs. ↩︎

Stuffing variables into a config file for Miniflux

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 13:18:38 +0530

Something I learnt recently as I moved hosts for my Miniflux instance.

I can just take all the variables I want (like feed refresh times, the base url or the address/port Miniflux listens on); and then stuff it into a config file and then launch miniflux like so …

miniflux -c 'path/to/file'

Pretty handy!

P.S. The entire list of variables is here.

Miniflux on Janusworx

My Custom CSS for Miniflux

Width and Size #

Italic Blockquotes #

Smaller title size #

Disable Tag Visibility #

In Summary #