Hashtags

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For every published article, lazyblorg generates a hashtag which identifies this article within the Fediverse. It is used for the “Share on Mastodon” button and for the comment line below each article where readers are invited to comment your article on Mastodon by using this very hashtag.

You don’t have to define those hashtags yourself: they are derived from the article ID (or the tag name) and they stay stable as long as you do not change the ID of an article.

The Hashtag of Your Blog

Independent of the article hashtags, your blog itself has got one hashtag which is defined in config.py:

## string: The hashtag of your blog (without leading '#') used in Mastodon share links.
BLOG_HASH_TAG = 'publicvoit'

It shows up in the pre-filled text of the “Share on Mastodon” button and it is the prefix of the hashtags of your tag pages (see below).

How Article Hashtags Are Derived

Temporal and persistent pages:

• The hashtag consists of the date of the ID followed by an underscore and the rest of the ID in CamelCase.
• id:2016-10-31-my-temporal-article results in #20161031_MyTemporalArticle
• When the ID does not start with a date in YYYY-MM-DD form, the date of the first publishing of the article is used instead.

Tag pages:

• The hashtag consists of your BLOG_HASH_TAG, the string Tag and the name of the tag with its first character in upper case.
• The tag page of the tag lazyblorg results in #publicvoitTagLazyblorg
• This holds for tag pages you wrote yourself as well as for tag pages lazyblorg generates on its own (see Tag Pages).

In any case, all characters which are neither alphanumeric, underscores, nor German umlauts are replaced by underscores. Three or more consecutive underscores are collapsed into two.

Articles tagged with the hidden tag (see Tags) do get neither a share button nor a comment line. Therefore, no hashtag shows up for them and they are not part of the hashtag file described below.

Article Hashtags as Comment Channel

Because lazyblorg generates static pages, there is no comment infrastructure of its own. The article hashtag offers a decentralized alternative: readers post their comment on their own Mastodon account using the hashtag of the article and everybody who searches for this hashtag finds the whole discussion.

The wording of the comment line is defined in the templates comment-line-en and comment-line-de of blog-format.org. See Templates on how to adapt it.

Exporting All Hashtags to a File

With the optional command line parameter --hashtag-file you get a TSV file holding all hashtags lazyblorg generated in this run together with the ID of the corresponding article:

uv --project . run ./lazyblorg.py \
   --targetdir "/tmp/lazyblorg/blog" \
   --previous-metadata "/tmp/lazyblorg/blog/metadata.pk" \
   --new-metadata "/tmp/lazyblorg/blog/metadata.pk" \
   --logfile "/tmp/lazyblorg/blog/logfile.org" \
   --hashtag-file "/tmp/lazyblorg/blog/hashtags.csv" \
   --orgfiles your-org-files.org templates/blog-format.org

This is handy if you want to look up which article belongs to a hashtag you stumbled upon in the Fediverse, if you want to feed a Mastodon search or notification tool with the hashtags of your blog, or if you simply want to check the hashtags lazyblorg came up with.

The file is sorted by hashtag and holds one header line followed by one line per hashtag. The columns are separated by tabulators - just like the file of --external-url-file:

Column	Content
Hashtag	the hashtag including its leading #
ID	the ID of the article, prefixed with id:
IDType	org-id or auto-generated (see below)
Category	TEMPORAL, PERSISTENT, or TAGS (see Page Types)
Title	the title of the article
URL	the path of the article relative to the base URL of your blog

An example of an exported file (tabulators shown as spaces here):

Hashtag                      ID                            IDType          Category    Title                    URL
#20161031_MyTemporalArticle  id:2016-10-31-my-temporal...  org-id          TEMPORAL    A Temporal Article       2016/10/31/my-temporal-article
#publicvoitTagExampletag     id:2016-10-31-a-tag-page      org-id          TAGS        exampletag               tags/exampletag
#publicvoitTagLazyblorg      id:lb_tag-lazyblorg           auto-generated  TAGS        lazyblorg                tags/lazyblorg

Articles Without an Org-mode ID Property

Every article you write yourself needs a unique :ID: property in order to get published. Those articles are marked with org-id in the IDType column.

There is exactly one type of page which does get a hashtag without having an :ID: property of its own: tag pages of tags where you did not write a tag page yourself. lazyblorg generates those pages automatically (see Tag Pages) and derives an internal ID of the form lb_tag-<tagname> from the tag name. Those lines are marked with auto-generated in the IDType column. Please note that despite of the id: prefix in the ID column, this is not an Org-mode ID you could link to. As soon as you write your own tag page for such a tag, its hashtag stays the same and the line switches to org-id with the ID of your tag page entry.

All other generated pages - the entry page, the tag overview page, TagTree pages, the archive pages of years, months, days, and the Feeds - do not contain any article hashtag at all and therefore they are not part of the hashtag file.