I just open-sourced the codebase for the DEV Social Badge that I've been working on. Check it out on GitHub!
DEV Social Badge is an unofficial social badge that queries the DEV.to API to see if your blog post has been posted on DEV.
This first release, v0.1.0, should still be considered unstable and used at your own risk.
An important requirement for this to work: You must be using Canonical URLs on DEV.
This allows the code to determine which of your DEV posts matches the post hosting the badge.
Using the script
Using the script is fairly straight forward. You have to add a couple of tags to your <head> and a couple in the <body>, where you want the badge to appear.
Adding the script tag to the
Add the following script tag somewhere in your <head> to load the minified script.
<!-- Place script tag before the end of the head tag -->
<script src="https://unpkg.com/dev-social-badge@0.1.0/dist/dev-social-badge.min.js"> </script>
Adding the devbadge and script tags to the
The <devbadge /> will be replaced by the script with the social badge, if the script is able to find a matching post on DEV. If it doesn't return any matching posts, nothing gets added to your page.
If you're using a template for your blog posts, I suggest adding this to the template file for your blog posts - not your main site layout. This will help to reduce unnecessary API calls to DEV.to.
<!-- Place devbadge tag wherever you'd like the badge to appear -->
<devbadge />
<!-- Place script tag before the end of the body tag -->
<script>window.onload = function(){typeof findOnDev !== "undefined" && findOnDev()}</script>
API Limits
Currently, there are no published limits on API calls. But, that doesn't mean that there isn't one. It's possible that this could stop functioning.
Additionally, the DEV API documentation states that responses are cached for 24 hours. Don't expect your badge to show the positive reaction count in real-time.
You can help
You don't need to write any code to help the project. Just giving the repository a ★Star on GitHub will help towards getting the project hosted on other CDNs, such as cdnjs.
I will be adding Issues to the repository for areas where I'd like some help, as well as to get my improvement ideas out of my head, over the next day or two. If you'd like to contribute to the code, please check out the Contribution Guidelines (so far, they're quite sparse).
Let me hear from you
Please share your thoughts in the comments thread on DEV. I'd love to get your feedback and opinions.
This post originally appeared on benprice.dev.
Top comments (15)
Hey, This is super cool! One suggestion: Is there a way to pull reactions as it is (heart, unicorn, and bookmarks seperately) and display them with the icons? It would be more cool. 😊
Sadly, no. The API only offers a sum of all positive reactions - not a breakdown of each.
Ah, got it.
Btw, simply scrape the URL of the post and get the values from HTML.
Ah wait, you have to render the HTML - because it's built on react.
Yes, as this is a client side script I don’t want to scrape anything and rather just rely on the APIs.
I could make a request for the functionality in the API but there’s no guarantee it will be added.
This is really cool!
Thanks, Ben. Glad you like it.
Is there any possibility to get comment count or comments? I looked at one graph and it didn't seem to have a way. I didn't dig any deeper.
In regards to comments, I can pull the comment count and the last comment datetime stamp but not the actual comments. How would you envision those being used? Reaction and Comment counts side by side? or a toggle between the two? Or perhaps something else...?
You can pull the comments from dev.to/api/comments
For example, all comments from this article are dev.to/api/comments?a_id=268819
This comment I just wrote it'll be: dev.to/api/comments/m10o
The documentation is a "bit" behind :D
Thank you. I wasn't aware. Perhaps I will create a separate library for pulling all of the comments.
Not sure, I would really like to embed comments on my site.
As for omment count does it make sense to separate them with a pipe?
reaction | comments
I'll play with it and see what I can come up with.
Ultimately, I'd like to get a few different formatting options in place that can be selected based on how the user wants it shown on their website.
This is soo cool!! 🌻
Nice, Benjamin!