DIY Bearblog Appreciation Button

A simple button clicked by the mouse. When clicked, a counter increase from zero to one.

The other day I stumbled upon Naty’s beautiful blog and found lots of suggestions about implementing indieweb features on websites generated by Hugo — such as this very blog. Among the articles, a guide attracted my attention in particular: inserting a like button on the blog like Bearblog’s one? Is this sci-fi?!

I immediately went to iine’s GitHub repository and loved the idea, but quickly found that the “quick and dirty” self-hosted option is based on Supabase or needs a PostgreSQL database installed.

Well.

I want to own my data, and I don’t want my blog to rely on other services, so a DB was the only option. I already have several Docker instances running SQL because of one application or another, so adding one wouldn’t be a big deal.

Since I am quite new to Docker and similar tools, I asked AI for help to generate a Docker Compose file, a simple Node server, and SQL configuration. And most importantly, JavaScript to handle the button behavior correctly.

By myself it would have taken weeks. I think this is one of the good use cases of AI: to help you create something if you don’t have the right skills.

This way the behavior is what I wanted:

No personal data involved (the IPs are stored only in the machine’s RAM)
A single click per session is allowed by the browser (and limited server-side to block bots)

I kept the name iine because it is based on that; I just customized it a bit and automated it with Docker. No merit.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it is mine.

This is my repository if you’re interested.

Next, I’d like to implement some other indieweb features on my website… or better yet, I’d like to transform it into a digital garden! But, as always, I would like to build it from scratch, and it would take just too much time. We’ll see!

🎮 Nada

🎧 Just discovered Kröwnn… and that they’re Italian!

📖 A couple audiobooks I really appreciated

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