blog: author metadata ideas

[hellt]

I don't recall if in the original "blog feature" issue we discussed author metadata.
Currently we have a description field, a name and an avatar.

I think the following meta can be added to the author profile:

• social links (linkedin, twitter, github, email). When set, the relevant link appear under the author's description
• sponsor integration, can be github sponsors for starters. A user sets gh_sponsor_id to theirs profile name and a sponsors button appears under the authors description

can even be just a "heart" icon with a link name "sponsor" to keep things neat and short on the UI

ADD1: if there is a way to do that via partials customization (I failed to find a partial for author block on the post page) I'd be able to get going

[squidfunk]

Thanks for suggesting. You can definitely pull this off with theme customization, by overriding the blog-post.html template and the post.html partial´, which is used for the generated index pages. The partial structure is currently very coarse, which is a deliberate decision due to the fact that the blog plugin is very new and we havenÄt enumerated all use cases.

Regarding your feature requests: I think providing additional metadata for authors is a valid use case, so feel free to create a feature request with more details, screenshots, mockups, examples, whatever you find. We can then start discussing with other users what makes sense to provide natively.

[squidfunk]

Correct. This is also included in the example I posted earlier.

[hellt]

@squidfunk I was also hoping to see this in your zip collection, but it was not there

tree -a
.
├── .DS_Store
├── docs
│   ├── .DS_Store
│   ├── .authors.yml
│   ├── index.md
│   └── posts
│       ├── bar.md
│       ├── baz.md
│       └── foo.md
├── mkdocs.yml
├── platform.json
└── requirements.lock.txt

3 directories, 10 files

[squidfunk]

Ah sorry, my mistake then. I really only did the minimal bare bone. If you could pack up something and share it here, that would be amazing. We'll add a downloadable example soon.

[McDic]

@squidfunk

I was thinking how to insert "number of views" on blog post and I reached this discussion after few hours. For me, I am hosting my blog with Github Pages and didn't want to operate my own server, so I was planning to do following;

1. Use Github Actions cronjob and Github Secrets(for API key) to fetch Google Analytics data via API, then post-process and store them into local json file in /assets/
2. Include some Javascript function that loads the view data from that json asset
3. Edit overrides/blog-post.html, especially here under <!-- Post metadata -->

So the result would be something like this;

But I think this way is kinda too much effort and non-nice way because I am loading data from local files via async call instead of hardcoding a static metadata inside. Therefore I think providing a convenient way to include custom metadata would be nice. I suggest following 2 orthogonal patches;

• Add overrides/post-metadata.html or something similar to edit metadata section only, not entire blog post
• Allow custom metadata in blog markdown documents like

  ---
  date: 2024-01-31
  authors:
      - squidfunk
  custom:
      - icon: some_icon
        key: some_key
        value: some_value (optional)
      - icon: some_another_icon
        key: some_another_key
        value: some_another_value (optional)
  ---
  

Since we can do {% if page.meta.blabla %} in html overrides, maybe the second one is not very needed, but providing a custom metadata without changing html is a good deal I think.

What do you think about it?

[squidfunk]

Thanks for suggesting. We'll be revisiting the templates later this year, since we're planning to do a facelift of the entire theme. We'll consider this feature request then, but we can't make any promises, since the presentation of metadata might completely change. We haven't begun to work on this yet.