adding likes to friendwave.me

you can like logs and posts on friendwave.me, which is kind of cool. but it’s a static (jekyll) site so how?

well the first thing you need is somewhere to store them. i found dbhub.io which provides SQLite hosting and an API to read from and write to your databases.

i wouldn’t want to expose my API keys though so i need to put the actual API calls behind something. this site is hosted on vercel which provides serverless functions. you can just create an /api directory in your jekyll site, write some functions in there and suddenly your static site has a backend.

if you go to https://friendwave.me/api/likes for example you can see some likes data.

“but friendwave,” you say, “i haven’t authenticated in any way. how can you differentiate between different users?” i can’t. which means you can smash that like as many times as you want. (please smash that like).

anyway here’s some code:

# dhub.rb
# code for making requests to the dbhub API

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'base64'

def send_request(api_type:, query:, db_name:)
  encoded_query = Base64.encode64(query)
  uri = URI.parse("https://api.dbhub.io/v1/#{api_type}")
  request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri)
  request.set_form_data({
    'apikey' => ENV['dbhub_api_key']
    'dbowner' => ENV['dbhub_db_owner']
    'dbname' => db_name,
    'sql' => encoded_query
  })

  Net::HTTP.start(uri.hostname, uri.port, use_ssl: uri.scheme == 'https') { |http| http.request(request) }
end

# likes.rb
# fetching all likes
# should probably fetch only the likes i need 
# on a given page but this will do for now

require_relative 'dbhub'

Handler = Proc.new do |request, response|
  query = "SELECT likeable_id, COUNT(*) FROM likes GROUP BY likeable_id;"
  api_response = send_request(api_type: 'query', query: query, db_name: ENV['dbhub_db_name'])

  response.status = 200
  response['Content-Type'] = 'application/json; charset=utf-8'
  response['Access-Control-Allow-Origin'] = '*'
  response.body = JSON.parse(api_response.body).map do |row|
    {
      likeable_id: row[0]["Value"],
      likes_count: row[1]["Value"].to_i
    }
  end.to_json
end

# like.rb
# when you smash that like

require_relative 'dbhub'

Handler = proc do |request, response|
  likeable_id = request.query['id']
  query = "INSERT INTO likes (likeable_id, created_at) VALUES (#{likeable_id}, datetime('now'));"
  send_request(api_type: 'execute', query: query, db_name: ENV['dbhub_db_name'])

  response['Access-Control-Allow-Origin'] = '*'
  response.status = 200
end