How to Implement A Solution, See a Better Solution, and Chase that Solution So it turns out I dropped the github markdown-style viewcounts pretty much immediately after adding them to the site. I did this around a day after the last post, but just got caught up in work and other life events and didn’t write a post about it. This came down to that same blog post as the last post....
More bells, more whistles I don’t recall exactly how I stumbled upon this feature idea, but I decided I wanted to see (roughly) how many visitors I’ve had on the different blog posts I’ve made. Seemed like a simple enough feature, and probably doable in a static site like this. Turns out it is extremely simple, using a service called visitor-badge.glitch.me. Using a snippet from this blog post by Ravikanth Chaganti, which detailed the embedding of the visitor-badge service, I had what I needed to get this on my site....
Wait, why change? The initial choice of Disqus as a comment backend was a hasty one; it was chosen on a whim simply because I had heard of it. It had some clear drawbacks: Not terribly configurable to meet the theme I was going for External site for configuration and management Free tier supported by Ads (the biggest one) Not wanting to pony up cash for a premium tier I decided I would stick with this for now to just have some comments before migrating elsewhere....
Say Anything While pondering the limits of github pages, I wondered if a comments provider would work. Turns out it does, out of the box, really easily, down to the provider (in this case, Hugo and PaperMod). Comments I think will become useful as I start to write about non-blog topics like PowerShell specifics, where folks can contribute questions or suggestions to fix the content I’ve written. It would also allow me to track engagement to some degree (which I’m guessing is next to zero for now....
Automation Until today, I’ve been generating new posts by looking at the clock and figuring out which month to nest a new post under, then using an explicit call to hugo new with the expected path and output file name. This already did most of the work for me, since it draws from the default.md archetype file, but even that was prone to dumb human error. As a result, I decide to crack my knuckle and dig back into the ugly-ish world of bash scripting....