You're right, thank you for the thoughtful feedback. It's true that the blog post skims over the meaning of `generate` when introducing it, and that I'm doing a bit of extra work under the covers in this post. I thought keeping things light and interactive would help easing into the details, but it's true that the reader has to wait quite a long time to see what the preprocessor is doing exactly, and it's not clear until the end what exactly is going on. I'll add something in to signpost this a bit better.

To answer your questions, the post is trailing the repo. I've uploaded the full source comprising this post here: https://github.com/codyd51/penpal-blog-post-preprocessed.

The code blocks link back to the Github source via a custom Hugo shortcode, and I currently need to maintain this by hand. While wrapping up this blog post, I added support for generating this shortcode via an extension to the `show` command.

Here's what the penpal command to render a hotlinked code block looks like, in the source code of this blog post: https://github.com/codyd51/penpal-blog-post-preprocessed/blo...

Here's what the shortcode generation for this looks like in penpal: https://github.com/codyd51/penpal/blob/release/penpal/render...

I think it'd be really nice to maintain all of this automagically - it seems reasonable that the technical content being built up would frequently be hosted in a finished state somewhere!