How to add a new Social Icon to AstroPaper

Hot new platform? Niche corner of the internet? Or one specific to your area? This post will guide you through how to add a new social icon to the theme.

Table of contents

Merging back to the theme

The maintainer of the theme Sat Naing has said that he intends to only

keep the project supporting only a specific set of popular social icons.

So there is a chance that your icon will not be in the repo, but fear not, it is very easy to add your own!

Getting things to match

The icon set used by the theme come from Tabler and there are a quite a few brands on there.

Adding your icon, by example

For this guide we are going to use the StackOverflow icon as our example.

Find the icon

In this case, we are going to use the StackOverflow as an example.

Searching on Tabler for ‘StackOverflow’ we get a single icon https://tabler.io/icons/icon/brand-stackoverflow, we are going to need the svg code, so save it for later.

<svg
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
  class="icon icon-tabler icon-tabler-brand-stackoverflow"
  width="24"
  height="24"
  viewBox="0 0 24 24"
  stroke-width="2"
  stroke="currentColor"
  fill="none"
  stroke-linecap="round"
  stroke-linejoin="round"
>
  <path stroke="none" d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none" />
  <path d="M4 17v1a2 2 0 0 0 2 2h12a2 2 0 0 0 2 -2v-1" />
  <path d="M8 16h8" />
  <path d="M8.322 12.582l7.956 .836" />
  <path d="M8.787 9.168l7.826 1.664" />
  <path d="M10.096 5.764l7.608 2.472" />
</svg>

Clean up

We need to do some tidy up on what the theme provides us.

1. remove all classes other than icon-tabler
2. remove width & height
3. remove the viewBox
4. remove the stroke-width
5. remove the stroke
6. remove the fill

This should leave you with the following

<svg
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
  class="icon-tabler
  stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"
>
  <path stroke="none" d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
  <path d="M4 17v1a2 2 0 0 0 2 2h12a2 2 0 0 0 2 -2v-1" />
  <path d="M8 16h8" />
  <path d="M8.322 12.582l7.956 .836" />
  <path d="M8.787 9.168l7.826 1.664" />
  <path d="M10.096 5.764l7.608 2.472" />
</svg>

Now we can add the clean svg code to the src/assets/socialIcons.ts file in SocialIcons.

const socialIcons = {
  /* others */
  StackOverflow: `<svg
       xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
       class="icon-tabler
       stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"
     >
       <path stroke="none" d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
       <path d="M4 17v1a2 2 0 0 0 2 2h12a2 2 0 0 0 2 -2v-1" />
       <path d="M8 16h8" />
       <path d="M8.322 12.582l7.956 .836" />
       <path d="M8.787 9.168l7.826 1.664" />
       <path d="M10.096 5.764l7.608 2.472" />
     </svg>`,
};

Finally we can configure it for our blog in src/config.ts under SOCIALS. Setting active: true to add it to the site.

export const SOCIALS: SocialObjects = [
  /* others */
  {
    name: "StackOverflow",
    href: "https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=astropaper",
    linkTitle: `See what questions there are about ${SITE.title} on StackOverflow`,
    active: true,
  },
];

Ensure that href and linkTitle are updated for the corresponding link and label.

Full code for the above steps can be found in this pull request