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aaronpk_tv
#indieweb
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Day 14: Posting to my Website from Alexa #100DaysOfIndieWeb
If you know me, you probably know that I log everything I eat and drink and post it to my website. A couple years ago, I wrote a small Pebble app that allowed me to quickly post common food and drink from my watch! Coincidentally around the time Pebble announced that FitBit had acquired their assets, my Pebble stopped working completely. This meant I no longer had a quick way to log food, and have to pull out my phone again to make log entries.This afternoon, Tantek suggested that I use my Amazon Alexa to post food and drink to my website instead! Of course this will only work when I'm at home, but it turns out that I'm home a lot of the time I'm eating and drinking. I also eat tacos every day, so it'd be great not to have to get out my phone during breakfast.So today, I launched Alexa integration for Teacup, the app I use to track my food.This was quite a challenging project given all the moving parts involved. I started by defining the voice interface I wanted to use. Interaction ModelVoice interactions for Alexa apps have to follow a pretty strict structure. Alexa doesn't support interpreting fully unstructured text, so app developers have to define patterns that Alexa can match on. Invoking any Alexa app involves first speaking the trigger word, followed by a keyword such as "ask" or "tell" followed by the app name, and then the pattern of text the app wants to match. So for Teacup, this results in speaking sentences such as:"Alexa, tell Teacup I drank coffee""Alexa, tell Teacup I ate tacos"This gets turned into what Amazon calls the "Interaction Model", and is a list of "slots" along with corresponding keywords for each slot, as well as writing out some sample sentences.LIST_OF_ACTIONS = ate | drankLIST_OF_FOOD = Coffee | Cocktail | Beer | Tacos | Mac and Cheese | ...Sample utterances:"I {Action} {Food}""I {Action} a {Food}"It isn't clear to me whether the list of keywords I provided is the complete set, because while I was testing, it managed to post the word "on" for the food, which is not in my list.AuthenticationThe next challenge was linking user accounts between Amazon users and Teacup users. Amazon provides great documentation on this, and thankfully it's all based on OAuth 2.0 rather than having made up some other model themselves. Essentially, the Amazon Alexa app on your phone acts as an OAuth 2.0 client, and you have to build an OAuth 2.0 server into your app that it works against. This is a pretty clever solution actually. Luckily, I'm pretty familiar with OAuth 2.0, so I was able to build this out pretty quickly.One thing struck me about Amazon's recommendations about building OAuth support in your app. They say that they'll launch your authorization URL from inside the iOS app, which is a known antipattern for apps in general. In Amazon's docs, it says "The user logs in using their normal credentials for your site." This is a really bad idea. You never want to train your users to enter their passwords into random apps. This is the whole reason we have OAuth in the first place!continue reading... -
Day 13: Curved Lines for Atlas Static Maps #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Yesterday, Amy was asking if there was a library for drawing curved lines between two points on a map. She wants to use this for her travel posts, which say for example "Tokyo to Boston". We noticed that Facebook draws curved lines when they show a planned trip. Martijn was able to figure out how to reproduce this on Facebook consistently. You have to start by creating a "checkin" post, then add a "traveling to" activity to it. Notice that the line from Portland to Seattle is curved rather than straight, although it doesn't strictly follow a Great Circle line either.continue reading... -
Day 12: Whitelist and Blacklist for OwnYourGram import #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Today I added some additional settings to OwnYourGram. You can now configure a whitelist and/or blacklist of keywords to control which of your Instagram posts are imported to your website.continue reading... -
Day 11: Simpler fonts #100DaysOfIndieWeb
The other day I read a pretty funny blog post called "10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world". It's a little tongue in cheek, but overall has some good tips. One that caught my attention was the section on using web fonts.continue reading... -
I'm doing #100DaysOfIndieWeb! Here's what I finished this week: https://aaronparecki.com/2016/12/30/7/week-in-review -
Week in Review #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Webmention.ioDay 3: The avatars for comments/likes/etc that Webmention.io processes will now always be 256 pixels maximum. This avoids showing potentially large images shrunk down when displaying comments.Day 10: HTML status pages for webmention.iocontinue reading... -
Day 10: HTML status pages for webmention.io #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Yesterday I added a Webmention form at the bottom of my posts. If you used this form, it would show you a "check status" link after accepting the Webmention request. My Webmentions are all handled by webmention.io, and its status URLs return a JSON response. This isn't particularly friendly when someone views one of these URLs in a browser, since they just see a raw JSON blob.Today I updated webmention.io to return all responses in HTML if they're made from a browser. It checks to see if there is text/html in the Accept header, and returns HTML if so, otherwise returns JSON as normal. Now when you view one of these status links, you'll see something like this.continue reading... -
Day 9: Webmention form #100DaysOfIndieWeb
I finally brought back the Webmention form on my website! At the bottom of my posts, you'll see a Webmention form now!continue reading... -
@indiescripter Thanks for the explanation! It's great to hear this feedback from people new to #indieweb.
Your point about your expectation of being able to like or comment on the post directly on my website is interesting. I took the comment box off of my website a long time ago, with no regrets. I like that it encourages people to write replies in a space of their own. (Ideally on their own website, but at the very least from their own Twitter account).
However, it would be interesting to see what would happen if I let people "like" posts directly on my website, even if they don't have their own website yet. Maybe I'll do that for one of the 100 days! -
Day 8 part 2: Birthday Balloons! When you visit my home page today, you'll see balloons floating up from the bottom of the screen! All the code is in a self-contained javascript file if you want to use this on your site too! https://aaronparecki.com/assets/birthday.js #100DaysOfIndieWeb
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@indiescripter hm, what do you mean "silo-centric"? We often replicate silo UX on our own sites, and we syndicate to silos to reach audiences that are there, but ultimately it's about owning your identity and data. If you want to see a variety of things I'm working on, check out my "100 days" project where I work on something IndieWeb for 100 days: https://aaronparecki.com/tag/100daysofindieweb You'll find plenty of non-silo things there!
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Day 8: Pinned Posts #100DaysOfIndieWeb
I've never really been a fan of using pinned posts on my Twitter profile, so I didn't expect this would be something I wanted on my own website. On my own home page I can just write whatever I want above my posts, so I don't really need "pinned posts" there either. However I just found a use for pinned posts, but not on my home page!I've been sharing the link to my 100 days tags with people as a way to share the content quickly. I wanted to be able to have a little intro post above the list of posts, and I realized that "pinned posts" matched the pattern of what I wanted pretty nicely! So now, on tag and channel pages on my site, I can mark a post as "pinned" and it will always show up on top! The first post I've pinned is on my #100DaysOfIndieWeb tag page.continue reading... -
Day 7: Nicer sparklines for tag pages
A while ago, inspired by @adactio, I had added sparklines to my home page and tag pages. After having them for a while, I realized that my tag pages would look better as sparkline bar charts instead of as a plain line.The lines looked fine for tags that had a lot of data, but didn't look good when there were only a few data points.continue reading... -
Day 6: Polling tiers for OwnYourGram #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Previously, OwnYourGram would check all users' Instagram feeds once an hour. I changed it to have four polling tiers, and the interval for the top tier is every 15 minutes now. This means people who post lots of photos will now see their photos on their site sooner, and because of the tiered approach, I won't be wasting resources on feeds that post infrequently.The four tiers are:Every 15 minutes (on the 0, 15, 30 and 45 minute mark) - 11 usersEvery hour (5 minutes after the hour) - 12 usersEvery 6 hours (at 00:10, 06:10, 12:10, 18:10 UTC) - 11 usersOnce a day (at 01:10 UTC) - 38 usersUsers are sorted into tiers based on the number of photos posted in the last 14 days. The more you post, the more often OwnYourGram checks your feed! If your Micropub endpoint returns an error, then you're bumped down a tier. If you're at the lowest tier and there's an error, then polling will be disabled completely until you log back in.Thanks to snarfed for suggesting the tiered approach!continue reading... -
Day 5: Posting old photos from OwnYourGram #100DaysOfIndieWeb
I finished two updates to OwnYourGram today.There is a new page when you log in where you can see a list of your 20 most recent photos on Instagram, check whether they've been posted to your website already, and re-post any if you need to!continue reading... -
Day 4: Quill note UI improvements #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Knocked out a couple of minor UI improvements to Quill this morning. Previously, the reply context field would show the whole note, so super long notes or blog posts would take over the whole screen. (Issue 62)continue reading... -
Day 3: Resized avatars for comments and other reactions #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Whenever my website receives a comment, like, repost, or other mention, I display those responses on the post's permalink, along with author information if available. For likes and reposts, I show the profile photo in a list, so there are sometimes lots of photos there.continue reading...
