My First AI Skill for My Blog / / No Comments I’ve been a professional writer now for thirty plus years, and honestly, it’s one of the things I’m most proud about. When generative AI first exploded on the scene, a lot of people used it to help them write, and frankly, that wasn’t for me. I’m not the best writer, but I damn well know how to write and damn well know my own voice. That being said, I’ve been really interested in how GenAI can help with the process. I first wrote about this over two years ago: Using Generative AI as Your Content Assistant. In that post I talked about using GenAI for two very specific tasks: Helping with my titles Writing the description (which is part of the metadata for a... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: blog, first, skill
My Experience Asking GenAI to Design My Blog / / No Comments What was my experience using GenAI tools to design my blog? Well, you’re looking at it! As I mentioned last week, my new design came from one of my experiments using GenAI to help me design a new theme, but I wanted to share a bit more about the experience when I had time, and that time is now. About two or so months ago, I had the idea of testing out GenAI to create themes for small web apps. While my blog is actually huge (near seven thousand pages), design wise it’s basically: A home page A post page A "everything else" page That’s just three basic pages, all sharing a main layout with slight differences in what’s the main content of the page. I thought... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Asking, blog, design, Experience, GenAI
Simple Blog Example in Flask / / No Comments As part of my efforts to improve my Python knowledge, I’ve been looking at the Flask framework for a way to build Python-backed web apps. I’ve only been looking at it for a short time, but I’m really impressed with how simple it is. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of when I first saw Express. Before that, I wasn’t sure I was going to like Node.js as it felt like a lot of work to build a simple app, but Express handled a lot of the boring parts. The same applies to Flask. To get an idea of how easy it is, here’s the basic "hello world" from the quickstart: from flask import Flaskapp = Flask(__name__)@app.route("/")def hello_world(): return... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: blog, example, Flask, simple
Adding Recommendations to my Blog with Algolia / / No Comments I’ve been using Algolia for my site’s search functionality for a few years now and it works great, especially once the free tier expanded to cover the size of my content somewhat better. In that time, I’ve mainly just stuck to basic search functionality and haven’t really touched any of the more advanced features. This weekend I took a look at one I’ve been meaning to play with for some time, Recommendations. My thinking was, of course, a way to recommend/suggest content related to the current blog post you may be reading. This distinction is important because as I looked at the Recommendations marketing and documentation, the content is heavily focused on product... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Algolia, blog, Recommendations
Automating Blog Post Headers with Firefly Services / / No Comments 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 → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Automating, blog, Firefly, Headers, Post, Services
Update to My Eleventy Blog Guide / / No Comments Last January, I announced the release of a guide I had written for building a simple blog in Eleventy. Now that Eleventy has hit 2.0, I took some time this morning to look at the guide and see what could be updated. The first thing I noticed was that I had a heck of a lot of typos. I fixed those. I then went through the two main versions of the blog (before and after UI was added) and updated the dependencies to the 2.0 release of Eleventy. That being said, I didn’t do anything else. This is not to say that the 2.0 release wasn’t lacking in new features, but as my guide is meant to be as simple as possible, I wasn’t on the lookout to add any new features if it didn’t make... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: blog, Eleventy, Guide, update
Best maps apps for iPhone in 2018 – iMore (press release) (blog) / / No Comments iMore (press release) (blog) Best maps apps for iPhone in 2018iMore (press release) (blog)Apple's built-in Maps app should be the default go-to for many, including myself. You're able to see recent places you've been, or you can search for a new address or point-of-interest. It also pulls in data from Yelp for businesses, so you can see …and more » map app – Google News… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 2018, apps, best, blog, iMore, iPhone, maps, press, release
Google Maps app updated to fill iPhone X edge-to-edge OLED display – AppleInsider (press release) (blog) / / No Comments AppleInsider (press release) (blog) Google Maps app updated to fill iPhone X edge-to-edge OLED displayAppleInsider (press release) (blog)One of the most popular applications on the iOS App Store now takes advantage of the edge-to-edge OLED display on the iPhone X, as Google Maps has been updated to accommodate Apple's flagship handset. Google Maps version 4.41 is a free update now …Google Maps iOS update adds iPhone X supportSlashGearall 52 news articles » map app – Google News… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: AppleInsider, blog, display, edgetoedge, fill, Google, iPhone, maps, OLED, press, release, updated