Aaron Parecki

Today I made a few changes to XRay to make it easier to deploy in more kinds of environments. I also removed a bunch of CSS/JS dependencies and simplified the UI a bit.

Continuing yesterday's work, today I added support for parsing Twitter URLs to XRay.There were a couple tricks to make this work. I wanted to make sure that Tweets are always expanded to include the most data possible, and also wanted to avoid needing to make a bunch of HTTP requests. Scraping from the twitter.com website wasn't an option, since some of the data isn't available or would require additional HTTP calls to fetch. (For example I would have to fetch every t.co URL to expand them.) So I set to work using the Twitter API to fetch the tweets.

XRay is my service that parses web pages and extracts information from them. Right now I mostly use it to parse comments, but now that I've been adding support for reposts, it's used there as well.Today I added support for XRay to extract data from Instagram URLs!This means anything that uses XRay will now return structured data when given an Instagram URL, just like how it parses h-entry and other Microformats. Unfortunately, Instagram does not provide timezone data for the published date, only a Unix timestamp. So if the photo is tagged at a location, then XRay will look up the appropriate timezone for that location and adjust the timezone of the published date accordingly!Here's what the parsed JSON looks like for this photo. Note that the timezone is set to East Coast because this photo was taken at MIT.{ "data":{ "type":"entry", "url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BM4rGs-lApG/", "author":{ "type":"card", "name":"Aaron Parecki", "url":"http://aaronparecki.com/", "photo":"https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-19/s320x320/14240576_268350536897085_1129715662_a.jpg" }, "content":{ "text":"Here again" }, "photo":[ "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/e35/14269001_1162908790471145_6084871298582839296_n.jpg?ig_cache_key=MTM4NTA0NjQ2MjAyNzc5NTAxNA%3D%3D.2" ], "location":[ "https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/206258876/" ], "published":"2016-11-16T16:07:06-05:00" }, "refs":{ "https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/206258876/":{ "type":"card", "name":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)", "url":"https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/206258876/", "latitude":42.360011410484, "longitude":-71.091869836761 } }}In addition to my website using this for reposts and comments, when I paste that URL into IRC, Loqi uses XRay to expand it and provide a little text preview.

Yesterday, I updated my website to show the full contents of reposts. Today, I took that to the next step, and I now automatically fetch the contents of reposts when they are made. I also expanded the repost display to include showing the photo if I reposted a photo!

I learned a very subtle Ruby trick today.The Ruby parser will create local variables for every variable that might be set in your code before any of it is run.irb(main):001:0> if false; x = 1; end

At the beginning of last year when I was working on rebuilding p3k, I made the decision to drop showing the full contents of my reposts in favor of launching the new site sooner. It's been bugging me for a long time, since it means that my reposts aren't really reposts at all, they're just a list of links.Today I took the first step in showing the full contents of my reposts. Since my posts are all based on mf2 property storage, I updated my templates to display the post like one of my posts if the "repost-of" property is an object rather than just a string.Now my reposts look like this!