thingoftheday

A lightweight microblogging site powered by Contentful and vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Visit thingoftheday

Visit the tutorial article

If you've forked the repo and set up your own thingoftheday microblog, I'd love to share it with the world! ✨ 😎

Find me on Twitter and say hello! 👋🏼

Useful links

Contentful GraphiQL Playground:

https://graphql.contentful.com/content/v1/spaces/{YOUR_SPACE_ID}/explore?access_token={YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN}

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Want to build your own thingoftheday?

Follow this quick setup guide to get started in minutes!

We're going to make some small changes to some handy files in the ./setup directory, and use the Contentful CLI to import the content model and example content provided into your own Contentful space.

Step 1: Get the code

Fork this repository to your GitHub account, and clone it to your local machine using git or the GitHub CLI.

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Step 2: Get Contentful

Create your Contentful account. Sign up here.

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Step 3: Get credentials

• Create a new space inside your Contentful account
• Go to Settings > General Settings and make a note of the Space ID
• Go to Settings > API keys and generate an access token for the Content Delivery API
• Add your Space ID and access token to ./setup/credentials.js

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Step 4: Install the Contentful CLI

Using homebrew:

brew install contentful-cli

Using npm:

npm install -g contentful-cli

Using yarn:

yarn global add contentful-cli

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Step 5: Authenticate with the CLI

Run contentful login in your terminal and follow the instructions in your browser.

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Step 6: Run the import

Import the content model and example post to your Contentful space.

Access the Contentful CLI docs on importing/exporting data here.

::TLDR

Run the following command in your terminal, ensuring you switch out SPACE_ID for your new Space ID.

cd /path/to/repo/thingoftheday/setup

contentful space import --space-id SPACE_ID --content-file contentful-export.json

The terminal will do some fancy things. If all looks good - refresh Contentful in your browser and you'll find the content model and example post has been imported for you! 🎉🎉🎉

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Step 7: Run the application

thingoftheday uses no frameworks and is powered by vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript!

To be able to serve the JS module to the browser, you'll need to serve the files over a local http server.

You can do this really nicely with this http-server package.

Install http-server globally, and start the development server locally by running:

cd path/to/repo
npx http-server

And you're done

With your http server started, your credentials file configured, and your content model imported, you'll be able to visit your very own thingoftheday microblog in your browser - all within minutes.

BONUS CONTENT

Generate an RSS feed of the content by hitting the following url:

https://{hostname}/.netlify/functions/rss

The RSS feed for thingoftheday.xyz is available here.

And remember:

Build stuff, learn things, love what you do