Souping up my blog

# Souping up my blog | tea☆ Source: [https://qtea.me/posts/souping-up-my-blog/](https://qtea.me/posts/souping-up-my-blog/) For a long time I thought it’d be nice if there was a simple way for people to interact with my posts\. When you write something it’s nice to know that someone took the time to read what you wrote and maybe even got some enjoyment out of it\. I’m glad for those who let me know on Bluesky or Fedi <3 [Bear Blog](https://bearblog.dev/)has an unintrusive upvote button at the end of each post\. But I’m not using Bear Blog – my blog is statically generated and I’d like to keep it that way\. So last weekend I got the idea of writing a simple web service that you can give the URL for a post, and it’ll either return the number of upvotes or let you add an additional one\. To get started I looked at the source code for Bear Blog to figure out how to prevent repeated upvotes and protect against potential abuse\. In the end the only thing I adapted was storing an upvote as the hash of a visitor’s IP address together with the current year, which has one minor issue \(if you post something at the end of a year it can be upvoted again within a short time\), but overall works well enough\. I added an allow list so only upvotes for certain sites are accepted and then did a quick check whether the upvoted post actually exists\. Since the web service is completely separate from my blog I just had to write a little bit of JavaScript to fetch the upvotes when a post is loaded, and then add a button to allow people to add an upvote\. When I initially started the project I decided to name it “upvaas” \(upvotes as a service\), because that’s what it is\. But turns out “upvaas” is a[Hindi word](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%89%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B8)\(meaning “fasting”\), which by itself wouldn’t be enough of a reason to change the name \(it’s not a bad word, and in a way upvoting is kinda the opposite of fasting?\), but it did make me wonder if I could come up with something more unique and less big tech sounding\. Supvaas? \(silly upvotes as as service\) Soup?? \(silly/service of upvotes\) You’re telling me a soup upvoted this post??? The silliness of “soup” stuck with me, so I promptly renamed the project to “[soupvotes](https://codeberg.org/qtea/soupvotes)” \(I want to avoid being confused in the future when I stumble upon a folder that’s just named “soup”\) and here we are\. I think “soup” is also fitting because I wanted to use a steaming tea cup as an indicator for upvoted posts – and soup is also pretty steamy\. So from now on you can stir \(upvote\) my writing by clicking the tea cup under each post\. Tea you around\!