Share and Save Your Bookmarks!
Webmarks is an app for saving and sharing bookmarks. Users can organize their bookmarks into topics, “like” other user’s bookmarks, and add new bookmarks to their list via email.
Tools
Rails, Rspec, Devise, Pundit, Embedly, Mailgun, Faker, Bootstrap, Atom, Ubuntu
The Specs
Webmarks provides an interface for users to save bookmarks into Topics, as well as view the bookmarks of other users and “like” them. Users can also send emails to the app to have them added to their Bookmark list. Devise is used to handle authentication, with Pundit used to ensure other users cannot add or delete the bookmarks or topics of other users. Mailgun and an associated Mailer are used to receive and parse out incoming emails. Emails are sent to a Mailgun tester email, and are parsed to use the subject line as the topic and the body as the bookmark url. If the email matches an existing user, the bookmark will appear on that user’s profile.
Challenges
While confusing at first, configuring Mailgun was relatively simple. Where I encountered some resistance was in generating thumbnails for the bookmarks. One of my personal goals was with this project was to add a little more visual flare to this project and acclimate myself more to CSS styling.
I ended up settling on using Embedly to handle auto-generation of bookmark thumbnails. My initial thought was to have it show a snapshot of the page, but when I realized that would be too tricky. I tried to find a way to pull the favicon from a page, but I was unsuccessful in finding a way to do that. I settled on having Emedly pull the first image it finds from the page, which is usually the logo. Other times, however, it ends up being a random image.
Overall
This was a fairly straightforward project that nonetheless taught me a few new tricks with email integration. I spent more time on styling on this one, which helped me get more confident with CSS positioning.