Even Easier Progress Updates

I knew I couldn’t stay away from the automation bug for much longer. So I spent a good day or so familiarising myself with Hugo’s Templating and how Data Templates work. With a bit of trial error and a lot of squinting at syntax errors, I’ve managed to come up with a fairly good system.

Firstly, I extended the syntax in the params section of the config.yaml. You can now eschew the max and now keys and instead provide a file:

params:
  progress:
    - title: "Painting Challenge"
      max: 142
      now: 89
    - title: "Other Challenge"
      file: other_challenge

The get_progress_data partial then reads that data file (in yaml format) and extracts a list of items¹. Each item has a count and a done field. If they are missing, they are assumed to be 1 and 0 respectively. The items are added to the relevant total and returned. The shortcodes themselves stayed the same, but the data now comes from the data file instead of having to explicitly update the config file.

The other enhancement I made was to create another shortcode to list out the items in the data file and style them depending on whether the item is done or not. I also made it so that if an item is in progress² it shows the number in brackets behind it. The code is a bit convoluted, so I won’t reproduce it here. You can see it in the github repo. The shortcode is called list_progress_items. I think this will be the last I do on this. The idea is to focus more on the painting and the blogging, rather than making the blogging software progressively more complicated!