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I made DEV.to widget for websites/blogs

Saurabh Daware 🌻 on October 20, 2019

Hey Everyone! So I made an (Unofficial) DEV.to widget / profile-card which you can use in your websites and blogs (You just have to copy-paste 2 li...

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Ari Kalfus • Oct 21 '19 • Edited

This is great. Nit: Promote healthy web practices and add sub-resource integrity (SRI) via the integrity attribute on your example.

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

You can grab your hash from unpkg via the meta query parameter:

https://unpkg.com/dev-widget@1.0.1/dist/card.component.mjs?meta

<script src="https://unpkg.com/dev-widget@1.0.1/dist/card.component.mjs" type="module" integrity="sha384-755Jblzb17ugkA3KRCLz4XS8CPb3xEwBdBMk8ZBw51agtKmppILXMJrKvuTRkUhy"></script>

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) • Oct 21 '19

Came here to say that too — bravo!

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Oct 21 '19

Oh thank you! I've added integity hash to my codepen demo. Not really sure how I can get that hash before publishing so that I can set in readme (Apparently that hash changed from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2)

Ari Kalfus • Oct 21 '19 • Edited

Yup, the hash will change for each version of the script pushed to the CDN.

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Oct 21 '19

Oh I didn't know about this thank you so much! I'll check it out

KP • Nov 24 '19

@saurabhdaware this is phenomenal. I know you've open sourced the code but I'd like to build something very similar for my own site. Any pointers on how to get started would be great. Are you using the DEV APIs? Would I need to create those first for my own site before creating a public widget like this?

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Nov 24 '19

Hi KP, yes I've used DEV API. There's a DEV API that returns the list of articles on providing the username. Even in my person website I am doing something similar in the articles section saurabhdaware.in

Thank you for kind words 🌻🌻

KP • Nov 24 '19 • Edited

Thanks @saurabhdaware . Looks like the code you've written is in .mjs file format....which is new to me....I'll give it a closer look and hope you dont mind me forking and using it in the future! Some quick questions for you...

What is the advantage of mjs files for modules (versus regular js)? I've never used this file format.
How do you host on unpkg, and how do you create a command like this?

npm install --save dev-widget
Any gotchas I need to be aware of / careful of when creating my own widget?

Thanks for the inspiration! 🌻

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Nov 24 '19

.mjs lets you use import and export in web without having a webpack build environment.
You have to publish it as a npm package and all npm packages are synced to unpkg
Gotchas:
- The api does not return user's data directly, It comes under each article value with user's key
- If user has written 0 articles, you dont get any value so no user data in this case.
- If you are going to build on top of web components, you'll have to follow the webcomponent best practices (You'll find them on internet) for the widget to work in frameworks

And yes you can go ahead and fork it

Do share the link once you're done :D

KP • Nov 24 '19 • Edited

@saurabhdaware thanks! These tips are going to be really helpful.

I'll definitely let you know if I end up using it! First step, I'm trying to simply include your widget locally to see it in action...and then I can start modifying it :D

I'm trying to include this dev widget in my nuxt.js project, in one of my pages. For context, each page in Nuxt is nothing but a vue component.

Here is my code:

<template>
  <div class="container">

    <div>
        <dev-widget data-username="saurabhdaware"></dev-widget>
    </div>

  </div>
</template>

<script>

export default {
  layout: "default",
};
</script>

<script src="https://unpkg.com/dev-widget@1.0.3/dist/card.component.mjs" type="module"></script>

Any idea what I am doing wrong here? I keep getting an error:
Unknown custom element: < dev-widget >

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Nov 24 '19

you'll have to follow the npm install and import 'dev-widget' instead of the link</p>

KP • Nov 24 '19

Thank you...there's gotta be a workaround though! It works fine in a raw HTML file...so it should work in vue as well!

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Nov 24 '19

You can make it work in framework that way by putting that script file before end of body tag in your index.html.

These frameworks follow a particular standard and having compinents as module is by far the most comfortable way of adding anything. It also makes this process standard since it gets similar to how you would add a usual vue component.

What you write in your vue component is not really staright up appeneded to the final bundle rather they are in some way compiled (in v v v general terms) and they are bundled with vue's code along with it. So it is not really possible to standardize that script include thing (unless you write different widget for different frameworks)

KP • Nov 24 '19

That makes total sense @saurabhdaware . Thanks for the explanation! 🌻

I'll do some more research to see if I can get this working in vue / nuxt component pages!

KP • Nov 24 '19

Here's how to use your widget in Nuxt, for future reference:

answer re: Include external javascript file in a nuxt.js page

Nov 24 '19

@kiyuku1 's answer would work, but here's the complete solution that would work if we want to include a js (or mjs) file in ONE nuxt.js page only, instead of globally:

<template>
  <div class="container">

    <div>
        <dev-widget data-username="saurabhdaware"></dev-widget>
    </div>

  </div>
</template>

<script>

export default {
  layout: "default",

  head: {
    script: [

…

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Nov 24 '19

Oh I did not know Nuxt required separate handling. Thank you so much 🌻

Sean G. Wright • Oct 21 '19 • Edited

Nice work!

I love that you've made something so many other devs (including myself) appreciate (based on the comments).

The idea isn't that complex - someone else could have done it...

But no one else did - you did!

You took the time to figure everything out, make a quality, modern web component, and shared it with the world.

Congrats and thanks!

🙏

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Oct 21 '19

Thank you so much! this means a lot 🌻

Ben Halpern • Oct 21 '19

This is so beautifully done. I’m super impressed.

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Oct 21 '19

Thank you so much ben🌻 means a lot 🦄🦄

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) • Oct 21 '19

Will this create any significant impact on DEV API consumption?

z2lai • Oct 23 '19 • Edited

Wow, this adds so much value to a single-page portfolio by being able to show potential employers all the articles you've written with just TWO LINES OF CODE! The idea is pure genius, the execution looks perfect and I'm sure the code is just as elegant as the execution! I can also imagine this widget boosting the number of people using dev.to to write their articles.

So simple yet so beautiful. Extremely inspiring stuff mate, congratulations!