Showing off my top hits!

I've been wanting a good way to show top posts in Ghost, based on analytics. Yes, Ghost has native analytics, but this blog, personally, does not have native analytics. So, I thought I'd take PostHog out for a spin. Here's the result:

If you can read this, my integration is broken or you're using ActivityPub. I warned ya!

How'd I do that? (Short version. Longer write-up to come, and I'm gonna make it track likes, not just views. But not today.)

• I added PostHog analytics to my sitewide code injection. (~5 minutes, once I found the right page, plus 10 minutes to figure out how to get their site out of "OS mode". Probably a me issue.)
• Added an "insight" (lots of flailing, less than 5 minutes of work)
• Added an endpoint for the endpoint (again, flailing, very little work)
• Made an API key for that endpoint, locked down the scope, made it read only, etc. (<5 minutes, for real this time)
• Slammed out a little bit of JavaScript to hit the endpoint, then the Ghost Content API for the data not in the endpoint. (Should have been 5 minutes, was really 15 because Cursor is having an outage, and I'm out of non-auto API tokens because it's the end of the month and I'm cheap.)
• Fussed with CSS styles to get cards to look like cards. (Always longer than it should be. I should have just edited the theme rather than overriding post styles when I wanted index page styling.)

And yes, aside from PostHog, it's all front-end, no extra infrastructure required. (And analytics are nice to have anyway, so...)

Other options I'm considering:

• Reduce loading time by shoving more post data into PostHog, so that I don't have to hit the Ghost Content API on page load.
• Set up a cloud function that gets the data from the PostHog endpoint and tags my top posts (and un-tags anything that's fallen off the leaderboard), so that no client-side loading script is required.

But first, I think I'll get it tracking ❤️s too... And I did!

Update

And of course, the moment I hit publish, my PostHog endpoint decided to start returning fields in a different order. Because ... reasons? (It's almost certainly a me error.)

I'm using the beta "Endpoints" functionality. I think I've about got the problem narrowed down to the flip-flop only happens if I make this a Materialized View (and then maybe sometimes), but I'm having enough of a noob moment that I don't know how to fix it, other than not making it a materialized view. (I think it should be a materialized view - I don't need a live count of all site data, and if I had a lot of site data, it could be slow.) Any PostHog experts out there? This Ghost Expert is a bit stumped at the moment.

Hey, before you go... If your finances allow you to keep this tea-drinking ghost and the freelancer behind her supplied with our hot beverage of choice, we'd both appreciate it!

Buy me a tea ☕️