[HN Gopher] Show HN: A GitHub business card generator
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       Show HN: A GitHub business card generator
        
       I built this small app for fun, to play with image generation
       thanks to Vercel's new library [1]. You enter your GitHub username
       (or anyone's), and it generates an image with a few info about your
       account.  [1] https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/functions/edge-
       functions/og...
        
       Author : scastiel
       Score  : 99 points
       Date   : 2022-11-12 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github-business-card.vercel.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github-business-card.vercel.app)
        
       | prepend wrote:
       | Neat idea. It does not render properly for me as I have multiple
       | links, @leebrian.
       | 
       | Maybe only use the first link. Or wrap a little bit to allow for
       | multiple lines.
        
       | mthld wrote:
       | Nice project! Sadly the emojis present in my GitHub bio aren't
       | being rendered. I can't see them in the image. :)
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | Yes, there was a bug with the image not rendering with certain
         | emojis, so I had to remove them as a quick fix. But I'll
         | investigate to find a way to show them :)
        
           | franky47 wrote:
           | You'd have to load a special font that has extended Unicode
           | support to render Emoji. Not sure how that's done in Vercel's
           | OG generator.
        
           | leerob wrote:
           | You can use fonts to handle emojis!
           | 
           | https://vercel.fyi/og-image-with-emoji-font
        
       | sureglymop wrote:
       | I'm interested in your book. Is it available as epub or pdf
       | somewhere? Or do I get those formats when I buy it on Amazon?
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | Hi, for now the book is available only on Amazon (Kindle
         | format), but you'll find many tools on the web to convert it to
         | ePub or other. Also, you can read the book online using
         | Amazon's reader. Hopefully this is good enough for you :)
        
       | abhaynayar wrote:
       | I have 40 followers, but it shows 39 on the card.
        
       | bonney_io wrote:
       | Very cool project! What do you think about including a QR code
       | linking back to the user's GitHub page on the rendered card?
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | I did it at the beginning (it's quite easy), but I think it
         | took too much place on the image, and wasn't sure it was that
         | helpful.
         | 
         | I'm planning on adding a few customization options to the
         | generation. I may add the QR code as one :)
        
       | jansan wrote:
       | I really like that suble off-white coloring (sorry, someone had
       | to say it).
        
         | seangrogg wrote:
         | I came to the comments explicitly looking for this :)
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | V__ wrote:
         | You have nothing to apologise for.
        
       | arriu wrote:
       | Awesome! Made a change to my profile as a result but I guess the
       | site is caching generated profiles. How long is the cache?
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | The cache lives only in your browser, so Cmd+Shift+R (on Mac)
         | should refresh the image :)
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | Suggestion: instead of just my GitHub username under my name, it
       | would be nice if it showed github.com/simonw
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | Fantastic idea, let me add it ;)
        
       | blurrybird wrote:
       | This is excellent! Simple, works, fast.
       | 
       | It would be neat to see you do a Twitter version!
        
       | tapatio wrote:
       | What's a business card?
        
         | Piisamirotta wrote:
         | Hehe that is a funny comment.
        
         | chrisseaton wrote:
         | Still essential in Japan.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | Phelinofist wrote:
       | Doesn't render for me: https://github-business-
       | card.vercel.app/api/github?username=...
        
         | tomcam wrote:
         | I see it fine on my iPhone
        
           | Phelinofist wrote:
           | I'm on Firefox on Linux and it just renders 40% and then
           | stops
        
       | zadjii wrote:
       | Silly suggestion - show something like the contribution graph
       | along the very bottom of the card, like a border. Those who know
       | what it means will _know_, to everyone else it's just decorative.
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | Interesting idea. Noted :)
        
       | DistractionRect wrote:
       | Seems broken on Firefox for Android (mobile). It displays half
       | the card [0].
       | 
       | [0] https://imgur.com/a/CQ7QXkB
        
         | jonas-w wrote:
         | I'm using firefox nightly on android and it displays normally.
         | Maybe your internet connection?
        
       | cobertos wrote:
       | Huh, `@vercel/og` is interesting! It looks like the same approach
       | as `html2canvas` (implement custom rendering for each HTML
       | element + CSS property), with all the tradeoffs that entails, but
       | they actually rightly limited some of the features they're
       | willing to support (like external stylesheets). And it looks like
       | it'll be more supported than `html2canvas` currently is.
       | 
       | I quite like `dom-to-image-more` (sorta active fork of `dom-to-
       | image`) that renders a SVG with a foreignElement that is a data
       | URL of an XHTML page to a canvas. It also led me to rewriting my
       | own image rendering stuff to just build an SVG in DOM, use
       | toDataURL on it, and then render that in a canvas. So much
       | simpler
        
         | notpushkin wrote:
         | SVG is a really underrated medium. The only thing I miss
         | compared to HTML is flexboxes (but there's always stuff like
         | react-flexbox-svg [1]).
         | 
         | [1]: https://github.com/metabolize/react-flexbox-svg
         | 
         | Edit: for a React-less implementation, see
         | https://blog.scottlogic.com/2015/02/02/svg-layout-flexbox.ht...
        
         | scastiel wrote:
         | html2canvas and similar libraries only work in the browser, and
         | this is why @vercel/og is that interesting! Not only it runs on
         | the server (in an Edge serverless function), but it doesn't
         | have to start a headless browser to make screenshot and
         | generate the image ;)
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-12 23:00 UTC)