Blog Jam

by Alex Bezuska

Project started: 2016.12.21

Provide a list of game jam entries and Blog Jam will scrape the jam site and automatically create a blog post for you!

Works with Ludum Dare (both ludumdare.com andldjam.com), and Global Game Jam!

This is a tool intended to help #gamedev communities and game dev spaces like ours (Warp Zone Louisville) to easily show off the awesome games made by our community each time we participate in a game jam. The tool takes a provided list of game page urls and pulls out the title, author, screenshots, and description, and creates an html file that can be copied into a blog.

Example of finished output html (using the provided bootstrap.html template):

View the actual blog post made with this utility here: LD37 at Warp Zone Louisville

How to use:

Overview:

Included templates bootstrap.html (if your blog has bootstrap) and minimal-styling.html or raw.html (which includes some minimal css) to get you started. Create your own by duplicating an existing template.

new

New template type for Ludum Dare Ratings graphs has been added, try it out by choosing the ratings.html template!

This project uses puppeteer, request, and cheerio to scrape data from game jam websites!

Instructions:

• Install node (instructions for your OS here: https://nodejs.org/en/)
• Clone this repository or download the zip
• Duplicate config.sample.json and name it config.json
• Open config.json in your text editor and replace the "jamURL"(not needed for Global Game Jam) and game "urls" your own (see config.json help below for help)
• Navigate to this project in your terminal
• Run the program using npm start
• You will notice a file added to the ./output directory called blog-post.html (or whatever you named the outputFile in config)
• Open the output html in your browser to make sure everything is working
• Copy html into your blog post (see note for WordPress users below if you are having strange formatting issues)

Note for WordPress users: When copying html into a blog post, WordPress loves to do things like insert <br/> tags and automatically put things in paragraphs, this can really jack up the formatting of the post. To address this I really recommend you use the free plugin Raw HTML by Janis Elsts which allows you to check boxes to disable all of those settings for each post, example:

config.json help

• "jamUrl" - (string) - Necessary for ratings template, pulls in total number of participants, example: "http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/"

• "urls" - (string) - Example: "http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=34387" (All urls must be from the same jam)

• "ordering" - (string)

  • "default" - Games will be presented in order of the urls in the array
  • "alpha" - Games will be in alphabetical order by title

• "template" - (string) - Current blog options: "./templates/bootstrap.html", "./templates/minimal-styling.html", "./templates/raw.html" And a new ratings graph for ludumdare.com/ldjam.com: "./templates/ratings.html"

• "outputFile" - (string) - example: "./output/blog-post.html"

Contributing

Please do not hesitate to submit pull requests, I would love this to be a community effort. The game dev community is all about helping each other out and I want to offer this tool as a starting point to build something greater. Check the Github issues for ways to help that I already have on my radar, but here are a few important issues:

• I would love help to add the capability to scrape other game jam sites to this project – itch.io and jams.gamejolt.com would be fantastic additions!

Versioning

SemVer, see CHANGELOG.md.

Authors

• Alex Bezuska - Initial work
• Shout out to Barry Rowe for a lot of in-person help on the project

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.TXT file for details