May 2016 Summaries

Today Contentful is announcing a $75 million Series B funding round, which will be used to establish and expand its San Francisco office, scale its Berlin team, and build the best content management developer platform. The company has grown from 12 people in May 2014 to 60 employees today, with a community of over 34,000 software developers contributing to its open-source projects on GitHub. Contentful's platform is being used by customers across various industries, including banking, utilities, and pharmaceuticals, to create unique content experiences, such as digital signage solutions and mobile publishing in dozens of languages. The company has also introduced new features and capabilities, including a revamped web app and API, and has been operating its infrastructure with zero downtime for the past 18 months. With this funding, Contentful aims to continue growing and delivering value to its customers while remaining true to its company values.

This article discusses building Android N notifications that can be used to notify users of changes in content, such as new posts or product releases, without requiring manual input from the user. The author provides a step-by-step guide on how to implement bundled notifications on Android N, including how to add images and customize them using colors and text. The article also covers the use of webhooks in Contentful and how to transform them into data readable by the Google Cloud Messaging service using Heroku. Four imaginary friends, Lewis, Mary, Steve, and Ada, are used as examples to illustrate the process, with each friend experiencing different types of notifications and interacting with content from a blog space on Contentful. The article concludes with a discussion on how to handle potential issues such as out-of-memory errors when downloading images.

The author, a developer, attempted to integrate Facebook's Instant Articles feature into their blog, which is built using Middleman and managed through Contentful. The process was daunting but not hard, mainly due to the structured content, and took approximately four and a half days to complete. The author had to address various issues, such as image rendering, code blocks, and video embedding, before submitting the site for review by Facebook. The review process itself took five days, and although it wasn't automated, the author was able to activate automatic publishing for future articles. Despite some challenges, the author believes that multi-platform publishing is the future and hopes that Facebook's platform will evolve to include more facilities for software-related writing.