Playing With Github Profile
Lázaro Menezes
- 2 minutes read - 373 wordsSome months ago Github released a new feature for allowing their users to customize the profile page, adding more details than it’s allowed into the ‘bio’ field.
In order to do this, one needs to create a repository with its username and add a README.md file to it. With this, this file contant is shown into your Github profile page, right above your popular repositories list, like in the image below:
You can always check the official docs for more details and a step-by-step guide.
Since we’re talking about a kind of text file, in a source code repository service, you can imagine it wouldn’t take a long time for developers to start exploring the new feature in a lot of different ways. With that a lot of interisting profiles came up, from the most informatives…
…to the most adventurous…
…yes, this is a working game :D
Take a look into this repository, it contains a compilation of a lot of different profile ideas and also a list of awesome tools that can be used.
Of course I wanted to play this game!
How did I build my profile (so far)
It’s a simple profile, with four blocks.
First block is for badges: social media, counters.
The second one is a bio section, followed by a blog posts list.
Last but not least, there’s a fortune cookie.
The Fortune Cookie
Some years ago while I was experimenting a Linux distribuition that, unfortunately, I can’t remember which one it was, everytime I got into a new terminal session I was shown a message. Those messages were displayed by the Fortune program since it was setup into the .profile file.
This was my inspiration.
To show it I wrote a simple API to render a random imagem that could be embedded via Markdown.
You can use it, like this:
This API makes use of Fortune Cookie API Fortune API, that provides the fortune cookie messages.
I’ll talk more about the Image API in a next article. The API is still in its early stages, but I think to add new features to it. (Pull requests are welcome :))
Profile next steps
The next step for the profile is automate the article list. Stay tuned!