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With people moving away from Twitter, mostly to Mastodon, discovering the new accounts became a problem.

For people in the PostgreSQL community I created a website which lists different social media accounts. This website is part of the "PostgreSQL Person of the Week" interview project, however the data source is dynamic, and stored in a different repository. This allows me to keep the repository for the website private, but publish the data for the social media links - this data is public anyway. The interview repository is private, because who wants to see upcoming interviews anyway? ;-)

The interview website is made with Hugo, a static website generator. Normally Hugo looks for content, templates, and other data in the current directory - my private repository.

As part of compiling the website, Hugo can fetch external data, either in JSON or CSV format. This is using the getJSON() and the getCSV() functions, which can be used in Shortcodes, as example.

For the "PostgreSQL Person of the Week" interviews I'm using Hugo as static blogging engine. Part of every interview is the list of tags, which links this interview to other similar interviews. However until recently no one really knew if a tag is popular or just used in this interview. I wanted to change this, and add the tag count behind every tag.

The way I use Hugo I have the previews also online, and I don't want to count any interviews which are not published (still drafted) when counting entries for a tag.

Tags in Hugo are taxonomies, which is a user-defined grouping of content.

My problem: sometimes I forget to review published interviews for a talk.

I publish a weekly interview series, the "PostgreSQL Person of the Week" interviews. The data lives in a big spreadsheet, which has several sub-sheets.

The first one, the main sheet, is holding the overall status of all interviews, and has one column which indicates if the interview is complete.

Another sheet, the fifth one, holds the statistics data for my talk about what I learned interviewing the community.

The first column in the fifth sheet is copying the name from the first sheet. The second column indicates if I already looked over the interview and gathered all the statistics. And this is where today's problem came up: whenever I finished an interview (over 100 of them already) I marked this second column with a question mark ("?") to let myself know that at some point I need to read the interview again. But of course I don't always remember to do that.

My idea was to color the background of this cell, based on the value in the first sheet: make the cell background green when the interview is completed. This gives me an instant indication if I need to work on this interview or not.

Turns out this is a bit complicated, but possible.