Code Challenge 63 – Automatically Generate Blog Featured Images

There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. – Henry Ford

Hey Pythonistas,

In this new blog code challenge you are going to use selenium to automatically generate some cool featured images for PyBites. Let’s write some Python code, shall we?

The Challenge

Some time ago Bob made a tool to automate blog image generation: Featured Image Creator.

In this challenge you will help PyBites create some nice featured images for their code challenges or articles (heck, we could even use them on Twitter!)

Steps:

1. Make a virtual env and pip install selenium (and optionally bs4 or feedparser), however this is not a requirement, use your favorite tools …

2. Scrape all blog code challenge titles and/or PyBites articles (feel free to feedparse our RSS feed). We want images for all of them.

3. Using Selenium navigate to Featured Image Creator and set the canvas (button ID #submitDimensions) to your preferred size (e.g. w=300/ h=100, or w=200 / h=200)

4. Loop over the challenge and/or article titles you scraped and for each title:

   • enter the title alongside Title text in image (blog post) (#title ID field).

   • choose a Margin-top and Google Font from the two dropdown fields (#topoffset and #font field IDs respectively).

   • choose a theme: BG theme: material or BG theme: bamboo (#collection ID field).

   • choose a picture from the auto-complete (#bg1_url ID field), or just fill in the field picking random ones from the 2 lists below (one per theme):

     featured_image/images/material]# ls -C1|grep full|sort|sed 's@(.*)@images/material/1@g'
     images/material/black-blue_full.jpg
     images/material/black_full.jpg
     images/material/black-red_full.jpg
     images/material/blue-black_full.jpg
     images/material/blue-brown_full.png
     images/material/blue_full.jpg
     images/material/blue-green_full.png
     images/material/blue-lightblue-white_full.jpg
     images/material/blue-white_full.jpg
     images/material/blue-yellow_full.png
     images/material/darkgreen-red-yellow_full.png
     images/material/green-blue_full.jpg
     images/material/green_full.png
     images/material/green-red_full.jpg
     images/material/orange-black_full.jpg
     images/material/orange-blue_full.jpg
     images/material/purple-blue_full.jpg
     images/material/purple-blue-red_full.jpg
     images/material/purple-red-orange_full.png
     images/material/purple-red-white_full.png
     images/material/purple-yellow-white_full.png
     images/material/red_full.jpg
     images/material/red-green_full.jpg
     images/material/white-blue_full.png
     images/material/yellow-darkgrey-red_full.jpg
     
     featured_image/images/bamboo]# ls -C1|grep full|sort -n|sed 's@(.*)@images/bamboo/1@g'
     images/bamboo/1_green_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/2_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/3_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/4_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/5_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/6_white_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/7_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/8_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/9_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/10_green_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/11_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/12_black_olive_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/13_gray_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/14_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/15_green_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/16_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/17_green_white_olive_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/18_black_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/19_green_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/20_gray_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/21_silver_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/22_white_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/23_black_olive_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/24_white_full.jpg
     images/bamboo/25_black_white_full.jpg
     

5. Feel free to set the other fields as well, but so far your should have a decent featured image, so move onto to saving the image …

6. Click the Save button (#btnSave ID field).

7. Move the obtained file to an output directory and zip them up (using Python’s zipfile).

PR your work on our platform including the generated zipfile (or host it yourself and link in the PR to keep our challenges repo lean).

Good luck and have fun coding Python! Ideas for future challenges? use GH Issues.

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