wtf is blog-post-v1?

This is a small blog website built as a learning exercise, part of a personal one hundred day coding challenge, focused on days 57 through 60 of that challenge. It uses Flask, a Python web framework, along with a templating system called Jinja2 that lets a developer reuse pieces of HTML and fill them with data coming from Python code rather than writing every page by hand. The site pulls blog posts from an external API and displays them on a home page, with each post also viewable on its own dedicated page. It also includes an about page and a contact page. The contact page has a working form that a visitor can fill out with their name, email, phone number, and a message, when submitted, the Flask backend collects the form data and automatically sends it as an email using Gmail's SMTP mail service. Email login credentials for this feature are kept in a separate environment file rather than written directly into the code, and the README recommends using a Gmail app password instead of a normal account password for safety. To run the project, someone needs Python 3.12 or newer, a Gmail account for the email feature, and the ability to install the Python packages listed in the project's requirements file, which include Flask, Jinja2, the Requests library for calling the external API, and a couple of supporting packages. Once dependencies are installed and the email credentials are set, running a single Python file starts a local development server that can be viewed in a browser. The README also documents each of the site's URL routes in detail and lists the specific templating and form handling concepts the project was meant to teach, such as passing variables into templates, looping over lists of posts inside a template, extending a base template, and handling a form submission on the backend. This project is a learning exercise rather than a finished production product, and it notes that in its current state it fetches from the API on every page load rather than caching the results.