External Posts LinkedIn, Few questions

[avnerbensoussan]

Hi all !

Thanks a lot for the great looking theme, I really love the way my website looks. I was not excepting to have such a nice and modern look so fast.

Here is my website : https://avnerbensoussan.github.io

I do not want a blog page, but I want to add LinkedIn posts. I did it manually.

The main question : Is there a way to automatically feed my LinkedIn posts into the website? Or should I manually add the links to the config each time?

Also, the about page shows the latest posts. Is there a way to show predefined selected posts? What about in the blog page? Can I pin 1 or 2 external posts to always be on the top ?

Overall the website is great and I love it like this, this is just some small enhancement questions :) !

** Small thing, I sometimes had deploying crashes because of the names of the posts, usually if I deploy two changes in a row I guess old deploy and new deploy get a duplicate key name and crash... I don't know if there is something I did wrong (I usually slightly modify the name of the crashing one, wait a bit and it passes but they might be a cleaner way to avoid this). **

Thanks a lot !
Avner

[george-gca]

Lol, lots of questions in a single question. Let me try to answer them

Is there a way to automatically feed my LinkedIn posts into the website? Or should I manually add the links to the config each time?

Only if LinkedIn provides an RSS like feed, which I am not sure it does. Note that the external posts plugin is ideally to be used for few posts (or an RSS like feed). I say ideally because the content provider (LinkedIn in your case) might not like the amount of requests fetching posts information and might simply block them from happening, which would make the posts fail to appear correctly in your page. Even with RSS it might happen, since some sites might use some type of security to avoid bots and ends up failing our parser (check #3310 for example). It would be better for you to create a post in your site, then repost that on LinkedIn.

Also, the about page shows the latest posts. Is there a way to show predefined selected posts?

Currently not. As the name implies, it displays the latest ones. But you could implement something like the pinned posts in the blog page, but for the about page. You could even use the already used featured: true variable from the front matter for that.

What about in the blog page? Can I pin 1 or 2 external posts to always be on the top?

Yes, but we currently don't support that. But it should be simple enough to implement that, just add to the post in _config.yml a variable about the post being featured or not, then update _plugins/external-posts.rb to use that information when creating the post.

Also not sure I understand the deploy crash.

[avnerbensoussan]

Hi! Thanks a lot :)

That does answer all my questions, well done! What you said about the failing parser might be the explanation of the crash, too!

Thanks, I will have a deeper look at the featured variable!

Once again, thank you for the great work and your responsiveness.

Have a good one!
Avner