From fontawesome to bootstrap icons
A week ago I decided to verify my Mastodon account at graz.social. Since this website is built by hugo using a custom theme I thought doing so would be a piece of cake, just edit the theme by adding a line in partials/social.html to create a link to a mastodon profile if the user provides it in the config. Then add the link in the config of the site, done! Wrong!
First of all I had to debug the template code. While I was not really using the hugo binary for a long time, it was kept up to date on my laptop through regular operating system upgrades. The current version of the hugo binary refused to render the site and complaint about my usage of .Hugo.Version and .Hugo.Generator. Luckily the fix was simple by just changing .Hugo to hugo.
Next the version of font awesome I was using didn’t have a Mastodon icon, so I had to upgrade the icon set. What I didn’t have on the radar is that it has been a while since I worked on the theme of this page (well, I didn’t write anything for about four years either) and some things had changed.
Upgrading font awesome meant creating an account on their website and finding out how to work with it in 2022. Turns out, it’s not the same anymore. I was using a free license that was limited to 10,000 downloads per month and I didn’t find a way to use the fonts served from my server which would have meant having users of this site tracked by font awesome.
So a good time to replace font awesome entirely! After some time searching the internet I decided to give bootstrap icons a try. The theme is based on bootstrap so using the icons seems fitting. Hope you like it and hope the choice was a good one.
The verification process on mastodon worked as advertised btw. So now when you visit my profile you find a green check mark next to the link to this page.
