Automating and Responding to Sentiment Analysis with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph

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Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph has a simple purpose – bring the sum total of all knowledge to your fingertips via a search that emphasis data and relations over a simple text based search engine experience. Sourced by the entire web, Knowledge Graph lets you perform complex queries against billions of data points instantly via a simple API. I decided to take a spin with their API and build a "relatively" simple tool – news analysis for a product run in on automated platform. Should be easy, right? Let’s get to it. Note that the examples in this blog post assume you’ve gotten a free key from Diffbot. Be sure to do that before trying the samples. Designing the... more →
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Automating Image Improvement with Cloudinary

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Earlier this year, no, wait, last year (time is kinda crazy), I wrote up the process of automating background removal using Adobe’s Firefly Services. This post described a Pipedream workflow that monitored a Dropbox folder and… On a new file detected, generated a readable link Passed it the Lightroom API to improve it Downloaded it to another Dropbox folder Today, I’m going to look at a similar workflow using Cloudinary. Unfortunately, Adobe’s Firefly Services still have no kind of free trial so it’s difficult for developers to test it out. Everything I’m showing today however can be done with a free Cloudinary account (and Pipedream as well). Let’s... more →
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Automating Media Asset Creation with Cloudinary’s GenAI Transformations

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I’ve been happily using Cloudinary on my blog for a few years now, but it’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged about them. For folks who don’t know, CLoudinary provides media APIs (image, video) that work via URLs. So for example, I can craft a Cloudinary URL that transforms a picture to resize it to a particular size. Or add text. Or compress it. Pretty much anything you can imagine doing with an image or a video, and probably a lot of things you can’t think of, are all possible, and literally enabled by crafting a particular URL. It’s shockingly powerful and easy at the same time. More recently, they announced a set of AI capabilities, including – Generative... more →
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Automating Object Detection with Google Gemini GenAI and Pipedream

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For my last technical post of the year (although I can’t promise I’ll stop blogging!), I wanted to share an interesting workflow I built using Google Gemini and Pipedream. The idea was somewhat simple – how difficult would it be to build a "general purpose" workflow to look for objects in images and trigger an alert if certain things were found. Here’s what I was able to build. Step One – Image Input In my mind, I imagined this workflow would be tied to some service that was either streaming in video or generating still images. You could image a security camera posting new pictures every 30 seconds or so, or some other system that takes a picture at a regular... more →
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Automating Background Removal with Firefly Services

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As a quick FYI, if you would rather skip reading my text and jump to a video, I’ve got one at the end of this post. Be my guest to scroll down and watch that instead. One of the most interesting aspects of Adobe Firefly Services is what it enables in the automation space. I think it’s fair to say that these automations will still be followed up by a human checking, tweaking, and adjusting results, but if the APIs can save a significant amount of time, that’s got to be a great benefit. Let me demonstrate one simple example of this – removing background images at scale. The Remove Background API The Remove Background API is part of the Photoshop API family and handles the... more →
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Automating Movie Recommendations with Generative AI and Pipedream

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For the past few months or so, I’ve started tracking my movie watching with Letterboxd. I’m not doing a lot of reviews, mostly just logging, but I find it neat to look back and remind myself of what I’ve watched recently. You can see my profile if you’re curious, or check out my "Now" page as well. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use my Letterboxd data along with Google Gemini as a way to suggest the next movie I should watch. I was able to build a quick workflow using the incredible Pipedream in a few minutes. Let me share with you how I did that. What does it do? # At a high level, my workflow does the following: It runs, automatically,... more →
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Automating Blog Post Headers with Firefly Services

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Yesterday I introduced you to Adobe’s new offering, Firefly Services, and demonstrated a simple example of how to generate images from prompt using the REST APIs. Today I thought I’d share one of the little demos I’ve made with the API, and one specifically built to help out with my blog – generating headers. My usual process for headers is to go to the Firefly website, enter a prompt, let it load, and then promptly change it to landscape and re-generate my prompt again. I always feel bad that the initial, square, images are essentially trashed. It occurred to me I could build a Node.js utility to generate the images at the exact right size and even quickly display them.... more →
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Automating Mastodon Postings with ColdFusion

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I’ve had a lot of fun building Mastodon bots (see my list of super-important business critical bots as an example), typically using the Pipedream platform, and more recently, Cloudflare Workers. The Mastodon API is kinda stupid easy and with "The Other Network" going to hell in a handbasket, I don’t see myself building bots anywhere else. Just yesterday I came home from the Adobe ColdFusion Summit and I thought it would be fun to see how easy it would be to build a Mastodon bot in ColdFusion. Here’s what I was able to do in roughly ten minutes. First, don’t forget that to add automation to a Mastodon account, you need to go into your preferences, select the "Development"... more →
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