Using Val Town and Gemini for Sports Ball Stuff / / No Comments This is trivial as heck as the kids say, but I really want to explore Val Town more this year and I thought of a great, and simple use for it. Both my wife and I are big Saints fans (this is their year, honest) and attend most of the games. If they’re not playing at home, we’re absolutely watching it on TV. We both really enjoy watching football, but honestly, not enough to watch ESPN and follow the news. I thought – why not simply get a summary of NFL news from the past week and build an automation of it? I had this running in less than ten minutes with Val Town. First, the code makes use of Google’s Node SDK for working with Gemini. I setup my environment variable first... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Ball, Gemini, Sports, Stuff, Town, using
Using Astro for a Combined RSS View and Generator / / No Comments Ok, before I start, let me just clarify this demo is kind of a remix of my earlier post about building an RSS aggregator in Astro. I did run into some interesting issues this time around though and I figured it was worth a share. At Webflow, our developer docs are separated into different sections per product. For most of our developer products, we’ve got changelogs. So for example, here’s the changelog for our Data APIs and here’s one for our MCP server. We try to be good stewards of our developer community and ensure we document everything as clearly as possible. Each of our changelogs has an RSS feed as well so if you’re using a feed reader, it’s an easy to keep... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Combined, Generator, using, View
Using Val Town to Get Me to the Movies / / No Comments My wife and I both love going to the movies, but sometimes a few months will go by without us making it out there. Mostly we just forget what’s coming out and don’t realize till it’s already on a streaming app. I thought it would be nice to build a tool that could help remind me of upcoming movie releases so we can make our theater going more of a consistent habit. To accomplish this, I used the The Movie Database APIs and Val Town. The First Version Before I even considered building a tool like this, I investigated the TMDB reference to see how easy it was to get upcoming releases. Turns out, there’ve got an endpoint just for that: Upcoming Movies If you carefully read... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Movies, Town, using
Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Monstrous JSON / / No Comments Happy Saturday folks, and while this is a topic I’ve covered many times here, I was bored and wanting to write some code, so I whipped up a quick demo. One of my favorite uses of AI is to take abstract data and write a human readable form of it. Now to be clear, this is not something you need AI for. Given that you know the shape of your data, you can create your own summary using hard-coded rules about what values to show, how to present them, and so forth. What I like about the Gen AI use-case for this is the amount of randomness and creativity you get in the responses. In the past I’ve done this with weather forecasts and chart data, but today I thought I’d try something... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, JSON, Monstrous, Rewrite, using
Using Chrome AI for Color Suggestions / / No Comments Today’s blog post came to me on the way to dropping of my kids at school and made complete sense to me, but I’ve also got the flu and am heavily medicated, so take that for what you will. The idea was simple, given a description of something in the real world, could I use AI to generate RGB colors that would represent that abstract idea. I thought this could be a good use of Chrome’s built-in AI model and decided to whip up a quick demo. The front end is pretty simple, just a form for you to enter your description and a place for the results: <h2>Description to Color</h2> <p> In the form field below, describe the color you are trying to recreate and Chrome... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, Color, Suggestions, using
Using Google Static Maps in Your Print View / / No Comments This is just a quick thought experiment really. Yesterday I was working on a demo that made use of Google’s Static Map API. I’ve blogged about this API for probably over a decade now and I rarely see people use it, but it’s a lightweight, image only "API" for when you need simple map images without interactivity. Honestly, I see a lot of sites using the full JavaScript maps library when a simpler image would be fine. It’s also an excellent way to use maps in presentations or emails as well. It occurred to me that the static map image could be a great way use of print media queries in CSS and I thought I’d build a quick demo to show this. Media queries and... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Google, maps, print, Static, using, View
Using Chrome AI to Summarize Comic Books / / No Comments A few weeks back, I blogged about analyzing comic books with gen ai, and honestly, it worked really darn well. I extracted the pages with Python, and send them to Google Gemini to create the summary. I was naturally curious to see if this could be done entirely on device, using Chrome’s AI support. Here’s what I found. First, a reminder – a few days ago I updated my web-based comic book reader and described that process. The code I’m sharing today is built upon that first application, so if you missed that post, I’d strongly suggest reading it first. (And if you don’t want to miss any of my posts, don’t forget to subscribe!). How It Works Alright –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Books, Chrome, Comic, Summarize, using
Using Chrome’s Built-in AI to Improve AI Prompts / / No Comments Props for this article go to my best friend, Todd Sharp, who yesterday said something along the lines of, "Hey Ray, you should blog a demo of …" which is pretty much akin to bring out a laser pointer in front of a cat. Not only do I love getting ideas for new demos, his idea was actually pretty freaking brilliant, which means I get to pretend I’m brilliant as well. His idea was this: Given a user created prompt meant to be shipped off to a "proper" (i.e. maybe expensive) Generate AI API, can we use tools to help improve the prompt and make it "cheaper" before used. Given we’ve got AI in the browser via Chrome (ok, we will have it soon), this seemed... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Builtin, Chrome's, improve, Prompts, using