X Marks the Spot in Hydejack 9.2

X Marks the Spot in Hydejack 9.2

This feature release adds new social media icons for 2024 and makes dark mode available to everyone.

New Social Media Icons

Lots of things have changed in the world of social media since the last release. To bring Hydejack up to date, the default logo for Twitter has changed:

If you prefer the old Twitter logo, you can use it through twitter-old.

There are also many new social media networks, some of which are now included by default:

NameIconNameIcon
signalthreads
playstationmessenger
stripeslack
gitlabline
mediumxbox
wechatdiscord
mastodontwitter

If your perferred network is missing, note that you can always follow the steps to add custom icons from the docs, which is what I did for this release.

Dark Mode is Now Free

When I first added dark mode to Hydejack it was still considered a novelty. Unity, a popular game engine, was limiting dark mode to its paid version at the time — a model that I’ve adopted for Hydejack. Today, dark mode is considered a minimal requirement for any new theme and to reflect that reality, starting with Hydejack 9.2, dark mode is included in all versions of Hydejack.

Updated Docs

The documentation has been updated with a focus on deployment via GitHub Actions and CI pipelines. I’ve added a chapter on how to Deploy and updated many of the existing chapters.

The deployment experience for PRO customers has also been improved. You are now automatically added to a “PRO Customers” team on GitHub if you provide a GitHub username during checkout (existing customers can request an invite through [email protected]). Members of this team have read access to the pro repository, which allows the theme to be fetched during a CI run. For detail, check out the new Deploy chapter.

Google Fonts Off by Default

Google Fonts are now turned off by default in the starter kits, but remain in use on hydejack.com for visual continuity. All associated options continue to work as they did before. Only new users have to enable them in the config file if they want to match the look of hydejack.com.

The reason for this change is that sensibilities around privacy have changed in recent years. No Google product feels appropriate as a default option for an ownership and self-hosting oriented product like Hydejack.

To restore the old look that matches hydejack.com, add the following to your _config.yml file:

google_fonts:          Roboto+Slab:700|Noto+Sans:400,400i,700,700i
font:                  Noto Sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif
font_heading:          Roboto Slab, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif

On a related note, I’ve also decided against updating the included Google Analytics script, in part because the upgrade path is incomprehensible, but also due the the same privacy concerns that make Google Fonts a bad default option. I recommend independent analytics services like Plausible, Matomo or maybe even Counterscale (if you are a Cloudflare customer). You can include the tracking scripts by adding them as custom HTML.