Birming bulletin #3
It’s been about three weeks since my last bulletin post. Time sure does fly, and a lot has happened. Here’s what’s new.
Add-ons
The add-ons page now lives as part of the Bearming theme “system”. If you’re using another theme, it’s easy to get the styles right by simply adding the Bearming tokens to your theme.
Here’s what’s been added:
- Tree-style menu - turns a plain list into a tree-style menu.
- Inline menu - a horizontal menu strip with centered links and a dot separator.
- CalenBear - browse your posts by date with a monthly calendar view.
- Webring buttons - styles for showing random Bear blogs and posts.
- Footnotes - styles for Bear’s built-in footnotes.
- Status.lol - displays your latest status.lol update.
- Image filters - ready-to-use filters for a range of moods and styles.
There’s also a new Micro.blog add-on category, bringing Bear and Micro.blog together. Here’s what’s currently available:
- Latest post - displays your latest Micro.blog post.
- Latest photo - shows your latest photo from a feed.
- Feed - displays your latest posts from Micro.blog on any page.
- Gallery - displays your latest photos in a responsive grid.
- Books - displays books from your Micro.blog shelves in a grid or list layout.
Styles
The styles have been extended with Blockquote and Footer categories. There are also two new card styles for the header and the blog list.
Palettes
Three new palettes have been added:
The one I’m currently using for my blog is called Amber, but there’s still a bit of work to do before it gets added to the list.
Bearming
Even if it might not show much on the surface, there have been a lot of improvements to the Bearming theme. Here are some of them:
- Native browser UI elements, like scrollbars and form inputs, now correctly follow dark mode.
- The heading font is now a named token (
--font-heading), making it easy to swap independently of body text. - Small text now scales proportionally with the base font size instead of being fixed.
- Links in post content now show a faded underline by default, strengthening on hover, which makes them more accessible and intentional.
- Link hover styles are now correctly skipped on touch devices.
- Links no longer carry a redundant color transition that wasn’t doing anything.
- List spacing is now explicitly defined for a more consistent rhythm.
- Font smoothing has been added for crisper text rendering on supported displays.
- Table cell padding has been converted to logical properties, consistent with the rest of the theme.
- Blockquote padding now scales with font size instead of being fixed.
Other
Many new and useful resources have been added to the Blogger’s toolbox, and I’ve given my own blog resources a new look. You’ll also find the new Bear extras page there, featuring things that didn’t quite fit elsewhere.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of things I’ve forgotten to mention, but these are the main ones. I hope you find something useful.
Keep on blogging!