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Asked: 2024-11-27T07:28:10+00:00

This article has 61 positive reactions and 24 comments

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TL;DR

Using the DEV API the title of this article gets automatically updated every 60 seconds.

Addicted to numbers

I started blogging on DEV only some months ago. You could say, I am quite new to all of this. After writing an article I find myself frequently checking the numbers of reactions and comments. It seems like I am a bit of an addict. And I bet some of you are too.

We share an addiction. We're approval junkies.

— Jake Green, Revolver

It is not why I started this and I am sure it is not healthy. So I will try to stop and instead make this a bit of fun. Let's play around with the numbers.

APIs are the future

Back in 2010, I saw a tweet from Smashing Magazine asking about the future of the web. And I answered »APIs«, which is the same answer I would give today — 11 years later.

Let's have fun

It is so much fun working with well-implemented APIs and I was happy to find the DEV API as one of those.

My idea was simple:

  1. Get the properties of this article.
  2. Update the title using two of the properties (positive_reactions_count and comments_count).

The source

I use PHP, which is one of my favorite programming languages.

Get article properties 

function getArticleProperties($articleId) {     // Prepare URL     $url = 'https://dev.to/api/articles/' . $articleId;      // Prepare headers     $headers = [         'api-key: 1234567890abcdef',     ];      // Prepare method     $method = 'GET';      // Execute request     $curlHandle = curl_init();     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, $method);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);     $response  = curl_exec($curlHandle);     curl_close($curlHandle);      return json_decode($response, true); }
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Update article title 

function updateArticleTitle($articleId, $articleTitle) {     // Prepare URL     $url = 'https://dev.to/api/articles/' . $articleId;      // Prepare payload     $payload = json_encode(         [             'article' => [                 'title' => $articleTitle,             ],         ]     );      // Prepare headers     $headers = [         'Content-Type: application/json',         'Content-Length: ' . strlen($payload),         'api-key: 1234567890abcdef',     ];      // Prepare method     $method = 'PUT';      // Execute request     $curlHandle = curl_init();     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, $method);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payload);     curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);     $response  = curl_exec($curlHandle);     curl_close($curlHandle); }
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Putting it all together 

// Prepare article ID $articleId = 715066;  // Get article properties using the API $articleProperties = getArticleProperties($articleId);  // Update article title using the API updateArticleTitle($articleId, 'This article has ' . $articleProperties['positive_reactions_count'] . ' positive reactions and ' . $articleProperties['comments_count'] . ' comments');
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A cronjob is executing this as a CLI script every 60 seconds.

Inspiration

This article is heavily inspired by an awesome YouTube video I saw earlier this year.

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