upvoters post

archetypes/posts.md

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ---
 title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
 date: {{ .Date }}
-topics: []
+tags: []
 ---

content/posts/upvoters.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: "Upvoters - Small rust back-end for anonymous likes on static blogs"
+date: 2026-03-21T22:47:50-04:00
+tags: ["Rust", "Hugo", "Web Design", "Self-Host"]
+---
+
+## Long Story Short
+
+I wrote a little system called [upvoters](https://github.com/aselimov/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](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/about/) 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](https://github.com/clente/hugo-bearcub) by clente.
+2. Looked up [Bear Blog](https://bearblog.dev/).
+3. Looked up the creator of Bear Blog, [Herman Martinus](https://herman.bearblog.dev/).
+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](https://forge.alexselimov.com), 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](https://github.com/aselimov/upvoters) readme, but also feel free to email me if you need help setting it up!
+

hugo.toml

@@ -57,3 +57,4 @@ upvoteApi = "https://www.alexselimov.com/api"
 
 [params.author]
 name = "Alex Selimov"
+email = "alex@alexselimov.com"

themes/hugo-bearcub

@@ -1 +1 @@
-Subproject commit ecceb7afa9e0973ffc98336474eefe2544b60629
+Subproject commit 556c1725abbfe0601e216896b257858893642010