Adding responses from others

Some posts I’m writing are part of a discussion with other bloggers. Either the discussion started elsewhere and I decided to participate or responses to a post I wrote.

When I participate in another discussion, I often add links to the external posts that inspired that response. But for posts published later, it is “too late” as I almost never edit old posts. It is the same for responses I receive to my own post, as they (by definition) are published after mine.

To change this, I decided to add related posts I enjoyed reading at the end of my post. It doesn’t mean I’m going to add every posts participating in the discussion, only the one I liked reading. As I said in my post “No interactions / UGC to see here…”, I don’t want something fully automated as I want to always decide what is displayed on my site. It means that the process has to be somewhat manual.

I could have simply decided to edit said post and add a list in the markdown file at the end, but I didn’t like that idea because:

• It would have seem that it was part of the post
• I couldn’t theme it a bit differently
• It was not an elegant solution (according to my own weird standards :P)

So I decided to add the info in my frontmatter area, eg:

+++
title = "Do people IRL know you have a blog?"
author = ["bacardi55"]
date = 2024-07-01
tags = ["blog"]
categories = ["life", "blog"]
draft = false
responses = ["https://sarajaksa.eu/2024/07/do-people-in-real-life-know-i-have-a-blog/", "https://alexsirac.com/do-people-irl-know-you-have-a-blog/"]
+++

By doing so, I can then use the responses array in anyway I like within my template files.

As I have a partial template for anything added after the article itself (if the article has been shared with indienews, if it is part of a series, etc…), I simply added in that template some small code to list the responses parameter if it exist. If it does, it will generate a simple list:

[…]
<div>
  <p>Interesting posts from the community:</p>
  <ul>
    {{ range . }}
      <li><a href="{{ . }}">{{ . }}</a></li>
    {{ end }}
  </ul>
</div>
{{- end -}}
[…]

You can see the result in either the post or the “RE: To Blogroll, or to not?” or “Do people IRL know you have a blog?” posts.

Bonus: if like me you are using ox-hugo to export from orgmode to your hugo directory (in markdown), this is how I’m adding this custom frontmatter array:

:PROPERTIES:
:EXPORT_FILE_NAME: do-people-irl-know-you-have-a-blog
:EXPORT_DATE: 2024-07-01
:EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER: :responses ["https://sarajaksa.eu/2024/07/do-people-in-real-life-know-i-have-a-blog/" "https://alexsirac.com/do-people-irl-know-you-have-a-blog/" "https://notes.jeddacp.com/a-separation-of-spaces/"]
:END:

We’ll see how much I’m going to use this (or not) :).