Publishing for Little Printer using Node.js and Heroku

What's a Little Printer?

For the uninformed:

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful miniature newspaper.

Little Printers first came to my attention whilst chatting with Alice from BERG at OGN 28. I thought they sounded like fun and thought I'd have a go at becoming a Little Printer publisher.

A quick glance at the API confirmed my suspicion that node.js would be ideal for serving up content.

In order to simplify matters further both for myself and others, I created a node module that handles most of the complicated stuff. It makes creating a node server for serving up Little Printer content a breeze. It's all open source and on github, so take a look.

I thought I'd create a guide to publishing for Little Printer using a node server hosted on heroku. I'm confident you can be serving up content within minutes.

How Do I Do It?

Install Heroku Toolbelt

Make sure that you have a Heroku account and have installed the toolbelt. The instructions are pretty simple if you haven't and it's free so no excuses.

Get The Sample

I've created a simple example project that you can take for starters. You can clone it, fork it or copy it. Whatever works for you. Let's start by just cloning:

$ git clone git://github.com/roylines/node-littleprinter-example.git

Take a look at the code while your at it. It's pretty simple. Here's a quick overview:

server: initialises, configures and listens.
handler: allows you to configure your meta and get complicated content.
views: ejs template files for sample and edition .
icon: I guess you can work this one out.

Yep, it's really that easy (in fact there's an even simpler example here).

Personalise It A Bit

So you've got the sample why not personalise it a little.

Try changing the meta in the handler and replacing the icon.

Publish on Heroku

In summary you need to do the following:

$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku ps:scale web=1

Any problems take a look at the Heroku documentation.

That's It!

OK, you're done. You can use the BERG tools to validate the endpoints and preview your editions.

What Next?

Well I guess that bit's up to you.

I took the example and wrote a simple publisher for getting a weekly bit of Edward Lear nonsense, and here it is:

Little Printer Lear Nonsense

Have fun and let me know if you find the module useful.