AutoPost

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Inspiration

When working on blog posts, nowadays it has become essential to post the blog title and update our followers on Instagram and other social media sites. There are many automation tools that post to Instagram automatically, but very few (none I could find) that automatically make the post from the article. This project is an attempt to make an MVP for the same.

What it does

It is a web app made using Nodejs and Express js where the user is prompted to enter the URL of the Medium article or a news page (it has been found to be accurate to get the title of maximum news sites), and the instagram or facebook handle that the user wants to appear on the post. A simple designed image is then generated at the click of a button, which the user can upload to Facebook additional buttons.

How we built it

This is hosted on a server that renders html pages using ejs. The image is generated using puppeteer and hosted on azure as a blob file. it can then be shared using the link and can be downloaded. For layout I have used bootstrap.

Challenges we ran into

Many; some of them being an issue with async functions (error handling!) and deployment to azure, sending OAuth requests to Facebook (though it was ultimately not used in the project).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am a beginner in nodejs and planning and implementing it in a short timeframe from scratch is what I am happy about.

What we learned

Many things- deploying a nodejs apps to cloud services, headless browser scraping, designing html pages using templates and bootstrap was all new to me. Also , I learned about the power of Graph API and how great social media applications can be created on Facebook.

What's next for AutoPost

Originally it was supposed to post automatically to facebook but the permissions to the api take some time to process from (paperwork) also i am planning to make a chrome extension so this service can be launched directly from the medium website on the click of a button (the user need not add the url explicitly).

PS: the website is hosted but it has some issues due to puppeteer I guess, so after submitting it loads infinitely.

It was a great experience for me! Thanks MLH!