Long Story Short

I wrote a little system called upvoters in Rust to handle anonymous upvotes, and it’s compatible with Hugo! In fact, you should see a little chevron at the bottom of this post to upvote if you like it. Check it out if you need something like it!

Motivation

I’ve been working on some website refactors/design changes lately. My taste has been influenced recently. I may at some point write something about my taste evolution. The tl;dr for that article is that I came across an article on Armin Ronacher’s blog and was hugely affected. I’ve been trying to use my little piece of internet land to serve an aesthetic, technical, and minimal blog and his site is what I wish mine was.

While I don’t have all of Armin’s experience or skills, I thought I could at least try to give off a similar vibe with my own site. I use Hugo to generate my static blog, so my first try was searching through existing Hugo themes to get a starting point. The rest of the story I think works better as an enumeration:

1. Came across the hugo-bearcub theme by clente.
2. Looked up Bear Blog.
3. Looked up the creator of Bear Blog, Herman Martinus.
4. Read through some of his posts and noticed his little anonymous upvote button.
5. Thought the anonymous upvote button was super cool and wanted my own.

Upvoters

I then spent a couple hours putting together upvoters, a little Rust web server to handle this functionality. I picked postgres for the db because I run this site (and a few other services like email, matrix, forgejo, etc…) using a VPS that already had a postgres setup. Probably could’ve just done SQLite to make it easier on everyone but didn’t think about that until later.

This service just tracks votes in a single table with the following important variables in the schema:

1. slug: A unique identifier for each post that is just created from the URL.
2. voter_id: A unique identifier for each voter.

Since this is just a personal blog, and exact upvote count doesn’t matter, the voter_id is a UUID assigned to each user as a cookie upon the first vote. Obviously all it takes to “break” the system is clearing your cookies. This would allow you to upvote the same post multiple times but the only risk there is me getting delusions of grandeur.

Getting started with it

I wrote some instructions in the upvoters readme, but also feel free to email me if you need help setting it up!