Happy Thoughts 💭

A fullstack project inspired by Twitter, where users can share short “happy thoughts”. The app shows recent posts, lets you “heart” messages in real time, and displays timestamps like “2 minutes ago”.

Features ✨

• Post new happy thoughts (up to 140 characters)
• Like posts in real time
• Delete or edit a thought if authenticated
• “Time ago” timestamps (via date-fns)
• Responsive design with Tailwind CSS
• Subtle animations with Framer Motion
• Client-side validation and error handling
• Routing with React Router DOM (Routes, useNavigate, Link, NavLink)
• Fullstack setup: React frontend + custom-built REST API

Tech Stack 🛠️

• Frontend: React, Hooks (useState, useEffect), Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion
• Backend: Node.js, Express, MongoDB (Mongoose)
• Other: date-fns for time formatting, deployed on Netlify & Render (or Heroku, depending on what you used)

API 🔗

The project is powered by a custom-built REST API:

• Frontend live demo: Happy Thoughts

• Backend repo/API: Happy Thoughts API

Example endpoints:

• GET /thoughts → fetches the latest thoughts

• POST /thoughts → adds a new thought

• POST /thoughts/:id/like → likes a specific thought

Getting Started 🚀

Frontend

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/happy-thoughts-frontend.git

2. Install dependencies:

   cd happy-thoughts-frontend npm install

3. Start the app:

   npm start

Backend

1. Clone the API repo:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/happy-thoughts-api.git

2. Install dependencies:

   cd happy-thoughts-api npm install

3. Create a .env file with your MongoDB connection string:

   MONGO_URL=your_mongo_connection_string PORT=8080

4. Start the server:

   npm run dev