I was a guest on Cloudinary DevJams Episode #17 with hosts Sam Brace and Becky Peltz. Over about an hour we walked through how I use Instagram as a lightweight CMS for illustrations, sync those posts into Cloudinary, and serve them on my blog—plus a live code review, gallery demo, and a few side topics on open source and Sprinklr work. I returned for DevJams #36 to walk through the Astro migration and Cloudinary video work.
What we covered
- Background — from graphic design into web development, daily drawing on Instagram, and learning in public
- Instagram as CMS — hashtag filtering (for example
JMT_featured) to curate posts for the site, starting with Gatsby andgatsby-source-instagram, including an open-source PR for hashtag support - Why Cloudinary — portable image URLs, tags for organization, and escaping Instagram API rate limits that made local dev painful
- Automation — the instagram-cloudinary Node script, GitHub Actions on a schedule, Upload API, and Netlify build triggers
- Code review — repo walkthrough with Becky and Sam (TypeScript, Axios, Instagram Graph API, Cloudinary folders and public IDs)
- Live galleries — how synced images show up on the deployed blog
- Other work — brief look at Sprinklr projects, including the WHO Coronavirus dashboard
- Takeaways — hosts recap why moving social images into Cloudinary simplifies delivery and caching
Related write-up and code
- instagram-cloudinary on GitHub — the script and GitHub Action from the demo
Technologies mentioned
- Gatsby and gatsby-source-instagram
- TypeScript, dotenv, Axios, Instagram Graph API
- GitHub Actions, Netlify
- Cloudinary Upload API, public IDs, folders, tags, and Search API
- Next.js (my blog was on Next.js at the time of recording; it has since moved to Astro)
Episode timestamps
- 0:00 — Episode introduction
- 4:31 — Guest introduction
- 8:24 — How I share Instagram posts on the blog
- 16:39 — Code review
- 33:58 — Deployed galleries on the blog
- 44:03 — Other Sprinklr projects (WHO Coronavirus dashboard)
- 49:47 — Key takeaways