My submission for the 2025 Table Contest!
Ravelry is a website for fibre artists to track and plan their projects as well as browse and sell knitting or crochet patterns. Ravelry has a "hot right now" section which features the patterns with the most visits in the last 24 hours. This list is a nice way to see what's trending but to view any pattern details you have to go in and click on each pattern.
In this table I fetch the Ravelry "hot right now" top 20 and present pattern details in a convenient and easy to read table so fibre artists can quickly decide if they're interested in a pattern.
I used the ravelRy R package by Kaylin Pavlik to easily access the Ravelry API. I wrote some R code to fetch the 20 top "hot right now" patterns, fetch additional details about the patterns and their designers, and used the gt package to display the results in a beautiful table hosted in a Quarto dashboard with GitHub pages. I set up a GitHub action to automatically fetch new data each day and rerender my dashboard.
To run the code for this table locally you will need to create a developer account at https://www.ravelry.com/pro/developer and create an app with read only access. You'll need to save your API username and pass in an R.environ like so:
RAVELRY_USERNAME="username"
RAVELRY_PASSWORD="pass"
Next you can install dependencies with renv::restore() and render or run code chunks in index.qmd.
To use the scheduled GitHub Action in this repo, you'll also need to add the above credentials as GitHub environment variables.
If you're having issues with the Ravelry API or the ravelRy package, you can instead comment out or remove the get-data chunk in index.qmd and replace it with
pattern_df <- read.csv("data/pattern_df.csv")
and replace the hot_yesterday file path on line 133 with
hot_yesterday <- read.csv("./data/hot_yesterday_2025-10-12.csv")
data/pattern_df.csv contains a snapshot of the expected pattern details of the Ravelry Hot Right now on October 12th, 2025 and data/hot_yesterday_2025-10-12.csv contains a snapshot of the appropriate Hot Right Now history for that date. Please note that using this method, the GitHub actions associated with this repository won't work as expected.
I've played with the Ravelry API before! Check out my R-Ladies Ottawa 2025 data hackathon submission where I examined my own knitting data in a quarto dashboard.