Quick Links
About this page and why I created it! ❤
I want to run some analysis on dev.to for some future posts!
So over the next 15 days (at time of writing) I am grabbing every single article ever written on dev.to!
This page serves two purposes, it lets me see how many articles I have downloaded and it lets me experiment with automatically updating a page!
This page should update every 5 minutes automatically!
So bookmark this page and come back in more than 5 minutes, if all goes according to plan there will be a different set of articles listed below and all the stats will have changed!
Below are links to the last 50 articles added to the database, who knows they might offer you some reading inspiration!
At the end of the article are some stats so far, just in case you are interested!
Let's hope that dev.to doesn't rate limit or block me (I am only running 30 queries a minute just to be kind to their resources so fingers crossed it will be fine) so I can grab all the data I need!
Anyway, no need to take this post too seriously, it is purely an experiment! However I will be doing a full write up on how to use the API to update a post automatically and how I grabbed all the data too!
Last 50 articles added
here are the last 50 articles added to the database, have a quick look and see if any of them interest you!
Some stats on this experiment!
Just in case you are wondering what sort of things we can analyse (a very limited sample):
- Number of articles added in the last hour: 0
- Number of articles added in total so far: 263900
- ID of last post checked (as some posts are 404): 691700
- Average number of reactions (hearts, unicorns and bookmakrs) on all stored entries: 19.91
- Average number of comments on all stored entries: 2.41
- Estimated time remaining to gather all articles: 0 Days 00 Hours 00 Mins
Other examples of people using the API
I wanted to show what some other people have built with the API, so below are some posts suggested in the comments that you might want to check out!
Top comments (16)
I assume that April 9th was that last day for gathering every single article? Nice
Yeah so I am currently analysing 9.3 gigs of articles (no images in that).
Going to be doing a post on the best time to post to DEV.to and some other fun stuff with it soon.
Holy...
How much storage do you have :O
Oh loads - I think we currently have 250gb provisioned and only use about 100gb day to day, but it is a VPS so I can add 25gb for about £4 / £5 a month.
Nice! Can I borrow your VPS really quick? XD
Haha - if only I could I would but I wouldn’t want anyone seeing all my cobbled together backend code 😜
I probably wouldn't understand it :P I'm not into frontend very much, and would barely understand even aesthetic-looking code. I'm more for python.
I wouldn’t worry, even I don’t understand half the code I have written! 🤣
Has anybody else used the dev.to API yet?
If you have and you have written about it in the past reply to this comment and I will feature your article within this post.
I have use it on my CSS related website to grab my own articles with their stat here: css-challenges.com/blog/
Have you written about it anywhere? I will link to your article if you have!
not yet :) will probably do it in the future.
Actually - hang on, where did you get the viewcounts? Is that a different endpoint?
Nevermind, I realised you can get view counts for your own articles but not for everybody elses.
You will find different endpoint for the same purpose and some them requires the API key. This one: docs.forem.com/api/#operation/getU... can give you the viewcounts. I don't think you can get the viewcounts for articles that aren't yours.
I "used" it to deploy this dev-stats endpoint:
A simple RESTful service to display DEV.to stats
Khang ・ Mar 11 ・ 2 min read
What I have decided to do (as this post is getting very little traffic due to when I deployed it and the unclear title etc.) is to feature API users in a future article as well.
However your article should now be showing up at the bottom of this article just to keep my promise!
Great usage of the API, followed 😀