Submission: DEV.to View Count

#dohackathon

What I built

I built a view and commenter tracker and graphing tool for DEV.to!

Category Submission:

I'm submitting this to Program for the People! I think everyone loves seeing their posts get attention, and who doesn't love some good graphs to go along with it! Hopefully, people can enjoy this tool with their new DEV.to posts this year!

App Link

Each 'instance' is specific to the owning user, so here is my stats page: https://devto-view-count-graphs-8d7kh.ondigitalocean.app/

Here is a direct link to the stats from this very post! How meta: https://devto-view-count-graphs-8d7kh.ondigitalocean.app/articles/100637/page_views

Screenshots

GIF Demo First! More Screenshots at the bottom

Description

This project runs every 10 minutes and hits the dev.to API for a list of all your published articles and their associated Reactions, Comments, and Views. It makes a record of each of their three stats for each article.
With this data in hand, we can stitch together some nice graphs so you can visualize how your articles are doing overtime!
You can even download the graphs and tweet them out if you are really excited about a particular article!

Link to Source Code

https://github.com/coreyja/devto-view-count-graphs

Permissive License

MIT: https://github.com/coreyja/devto-view-count-graphs/blob/main/LICENSE

Background

Recently I had a post I published that dev.to tweeted about, so I spent the day looking at my dashboard and watching the view count numbers update.
This moment was a perfect storm! I was about to have some free time over the holidays, and I remembered that there was a hackathon going on! This seemed like a perfect little project, and I'm really excited to share it with you guys today!

How I built it

I built this using Ruby on Rails as the base. Since this was something I'm familiar with, it lets me focus on other parts of the project!
I've been doing lots of React and Single Page App work recently, so I wanted to do something different here and get back to good ole Rails views, and it was great! Sometimes it is nice to remind myself that for simple projects, all that complexity isn't needed! I followed the "Rails Way" and went with Stimulus JS for the JS interactions. I've done this before too, but it was good to do again after a while in SPA land.

There were some things I was really excited to try out here, mainly (Tailwind CSS)[https://tailwindcss.com/]! I really loved using Tailwind for this project! I really feel like utility classes are a great way to write CSS and HTML and made prototyping really easy.

My absolute favorite part about this project was designing and building it with my Fiance! She's been getting interested in UI/UX Design, and this was an enjoyable way to work together and build something! I did the coding, but she really helped it all come together on the design side. I was looking at some boring looking pages and graphs until she stepped in and helped me out!