Using Emojis in Categories

Understanding Micro.blog
1

I use emojis a lot in categories

I am moving my design around and exposing categories on my posts

That part works - BUT the emojis seem to be all replaced with ?

Claude tells me that I should add unicodes to my CSS - does that sound right??

eg:

/* Pushpin */ span.callsit::before { content: "\1F4CC Posted in: " !important; }

this will be very annoying, needs a lot and not going to do - my hip pocket fix is to rename my categories back to text - but before I do that

Claude suggested:

Check if this is a Micro.blog theme encoding issue. Some themes force UTF-8 encoding that doesn’t play well with emoji. You might be able to fix it globally in the theme’s <head> instead of individual CSS rules.

My core template is hitchens - which is now 4 years out of date … bridge too far?

Time to bite the bullet and switch to a more modern design?

All and any help / direction welcome.

Many thanks.

2

Which theme are you using, the default? Sumo? I use TinyTheme (built in a similar manner) and I don’t have issues, I use emojis in my posts and on the main page… Is that what you mean?

3

Odd - i replied to this - but it doesn’t seem to be here - so going again.

I started with Hitchens. - but making lots of changes to it. That said - emojis all work well in titles and body - it is in categories I am having the problem.

According to Claude I can fix this - but either I need access to files that I don’t have because Micro.Blog / Hugo ‘injects’ certain behaviours - or just move off the platform and recreate somewhere else.

Does that sound right @sod ? If so - a bridge too far for this bear I feel.

4

I believe this is untrue. I think that you need to set preserveTaxonomyNames: true to your config. By default, Hugo strips special characters from taxonomies for URLs in some places.

1 Like
5

thank you Jason.

By default, Hugo strips special characters from taxonomies for URLs in some places.

this might be categories then? in micro blog currently about 50% of my categories contain emojis - none render - if there was a micro blog hosted site out there that does show emojis in categories - then i know I can do it - emojis throughout my site otherwise work fine.

6

Categories are taxonomies in Hugo (taxonomy is a broader term that includes categories and tags as well as custom stuff you can do).

7

Nope, that sounds like plausible-sounding Claude-generated nonsense to me. :sweat_smile: Am I right that on a post like this, you want category links to show up as 💬 Quote, but they’re currently showing up as ? Quote?

For a human to help troubleshoot why that is, they’ll need to see the relevant Hugo template.

1 Like
8

Many thanks - not sure if you were volunteering as that human - but just in case here’s where I think something is breaking

Category Name: :eye: Asides
Path: /categories/myasides

And I THINK the offending code in the template is this

{{ $Site := .Site }}
	{{ $categories := .Params.categories }}
	{{ if not $categories }}
		{{ $categories = slice "Asides" }}
	{{ end }}
	{{ if $categories }}
		<div class="cat-list">
			<span class="catlist">Posted in: </span>
			<span class="post-categories">
				<span class="article-category">
					{{ range $i, $e := $categories }}
						{{ if gt $i 0 }}
							<span>•</span>
						{{ end }}
						<a class="article-category-link" href="{{ $Site.BaseURL }}/categories/{{ $e | urlize }}">{{ $e }}</a>
					{{ end }}
				</span>
			</span>
		</div>

does that help? or need the whole thing?

My thanks in anticipation.

9

Yeah, that’s probably it. You could try switching that snippet out with one that’s known to work from the Sumo theme:

{{ if .Params.categories }}
{{ with .GetTerms "categories" }}
  <ul class="post-tags">
    {{ range . }}
      <li><a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .LinkTitle }}</a></li>
    {{ end }}
  </ul>
{{ end }}
{{ end }}
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10

Thank you Sven - that did it. Back to the tweaks :slight_smile:

CleanShot 2026-05-07 at 15.07.13@2x
CleanShot 2026-05-07 at 15.07.13@2x1978×646 47.9 KB

Claude suitable reprimanded - though I don’t know why I bother - he never listens!

2 Likes