Aaron Parecki

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!

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!

aaronparecki.comDay 11: I dropped the web font in favor of a handful of system fonts for various platforms.Day 13: I added support for drawing curved maps lines to Atlas, which I use to generate the maps on my site. Now my travel plans show a nice line for each flight leg.Day 16: I improved the display of comments on my posts, including displaying some basic HTML formatting from comments, autolinking comment text, and showing images.

Quill started out as a sample Micropub client with a lot of useful debugging information. As it's grown, I've been slowly adding more posting interfaces to Quill, and tweaking them to look less like a debugging tool and more like a real app. Instead, micropub.rocks has taken over as a more detailed debugging utility for building a Micropub endpoint, so I can now optimize Quill for being more user-friendly and less developer-focused. At IndieWebCamp Germany in 2015, I added a rich editor to Quill, inspired by the clean Medium interface. You can even use the Quill rich editor without being logged in! It will save the post to your browser's localstorage as a draft, and let you post it after you log in. I wanted to make an interface that anybody would feel comfortable writing in, and be able to show it to people without them first logging in, as an introduction to what it might look like to have nice writing applications that aren't tied to a specific backend like Medium.In order to help people get started with Quill, today I wrote some more documentation for it!When you're logged out and click the "publish" button, it prompts you to log in and links out to the documentation home page.