/quarantine-poem-anthology

A simple Sinatra app using Airtable as the back-end for an anthology of poems.

Primary LanguageHTML

A simple Sinatra app using Airtable as the back-end for an anthology of poems.

It's essentially a nicer public front-end to an Airtable, which gives you some extra features:

  • Public-shareable nicely-formatted site, with a small group of contributors that can be easily managed via Airtable.
  • Caches in memory so that the Airtable API is only pinged on server startup, or when you hit the /refresh endpoint. Yes, it's possible to hit the rate limit by "DDOS"ing this endpoint, in which case you'd not be able to see new updates to the Airtable.
  • Searchability with regex, including custom search by (in this case) Author or Submitter.
  • Automatic RSS feed, so that people can subscribe in proper internet newsreaders.
  • Permalinks per row (per poem in this case).

My version is deployed to https://quarantine-poem-anthology.herokuapp.com/.

Setup and Deployment

You will need an Airtable with a table that has the following fields:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Text
  • Image - an "upload" field
  • Submitted By

On your deployment server, make sure to set the following environment variables:

  • TITLE - Title of the app
  • API_KEY - Airtable API key
  • APP_KEY - Airtable app ey
  • TABLE - Airtable table name
  • SITE_URL - Base URL where the site will be published, for permalinks in RSS.