I don’t know if you have noticed, but a few months ago, Github released some awesome new features. So, the other day I was browsing through a list of cool Github profile READMEs and saw some really creative ideas. This new feature really aims on making your Github profile more personal. All you need to do is create a repo with your username and add some markdown to it. Then I decided why not to add something like that to my profile? But what exactly?
Apart from getting some README inspiration, the other feature that I was looking at was Github actions. That also looked cool as it allows us to automate stuff within Github. The first thing I started wondering about was what kind of project shall I work on that makes use of both features. It had to be something both visual and something that could be automated…
“Something that modifies my Github profile. But what exactly? Once I find a cool idea I will write a blog post about it… Hold on a second… That’s it!!!” 🤔💡
Show links to my latest blog posts on my Github profile README and automate Github actions to fetch new ones.
As a typical modern dev, I have a personal site which was developed using React.js and Gatsby!
The first thing to do was to find a way to get a list of all my blog posts. What’s the simplest way of doing that in a friendly format like JSON? Maybe something like RSS? Do people still use RSS in 2020? I remember once a colleague asked for my website’s RSS feed, so apparently this technology is still alive.
Thankfully I found this awesome Gatsby plugin that generates feed files in both JSON and XML formats. So without much effort my website started having not one but two options to programmatically list all the available blog posts. 🙌
Next step, was find out how to add these articles into my Github profile.