Are.na Batch Uploader

A tool that takes your cute lil JSON file and batch uploads its contents as blocks to an are.na channel.

Requirements: Hold ya damn horsies

⚠️ An important request: Please don't be a butt-faced weirdo and abuse this tool by spamming open are.na channels. If you do, god (and me) will find out, this repo will be forced to go private, and a small corner of hell will be reserved specifically for your foolish soul. Please don't ruin this for us. Thank yew!

Now that that's out of the way... To use this tool, you'll only need one thing: a properly formatted json file. What's the format? Easy... an array of objects. What's the shape of those objects you might ask?...

[
  {
    "title": "title here!",
    "description": "text here!",
    "content": "url/text here!"
  },
  ... more objects
]

Are.na keeps things simple by offering only three inputs for us. A title, a description, and then a field for content. Here's a bit more info taken from their docs

Name	Accepted Types	Description
title	String or null	The title of the block
description	String or null	This is used for captioning any type of block. Returns markdown.
content	String or null	If the block is of class "Text", this will be the text content as markdown

Install: Alright buddy, let's do this thing

# clone repo
git clone https://github.com/egstad/arena-batch-uploader.git

# install dependencies
npm install

# run the development server
npm run dev

Step-by-step walkthrough

Techincal Notes

This was built with Node v20.5.0 (npm v9.8.0).

Libraries Used

• Vite: Dev server and build tool.
• Arena-js: A javascript wrapper for the are.na api, built by @ivangreene (thanks, mate!)
• Naive UI: A Vue 3 Component Library.

So, why does this tool exist anyways?

Ummm hi, me Jordan Egstad name-o. I'm a designerd who enjoys finding, collecting, and sharing things on the web for others to enjoy. Once upon a time I found myself with a few thousand images that I wanted to add to my are.na. Sure, I could have dragged and dropped them into a channel (I did), but I quickly noticed that a key artifact was lost: credit to the original sources. Very bad, no good! Contributing credit where credit is due is important! Entering these citations would have taken me days, so I spent an afternoon to make this instead. Is it helpful? Yes. Was it fun to make? Sorta. Is it ugly? Kinda but I like it!.

Pro tip: I'd recommend using python to take your data and shape it into the JSON format listed above. It'll make quick work of a large dataset — whether its a csv, txt, etc. Maybe you haven't used python before. If so, I promise you can learn enough to be dangerous in an afternoon. I'm living proof.

Hope this is somehow helpful to you. Toodles!

Egstad