Month: May 2022

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For my RSS to micropub implementation I needed to generate a decent slug in JS. I found this slugify.js gist by codeguy to which a coder called thierryc made some really nice modifications (but weirdly didn’t publish their own that I could find).

I tested thierry’s code in jsfiddle and found it left a trailing ‘-‘. Using the fiddle I was able to step through the code and see where it went wrong. I just added an extra replace and it worked for me.

I’ve never really found a use for jsfiddle or gists before so this felt good.

After that, if I never have to deal with any JS again in my life it might be too soon!

Watched The Addams Family 2 (2021) from letterboxd.com
The Addams get tangled up in more wacky adventures and find themselves involved in hilarious run-ins with all sorts of unsuspecting characters.

Utterly vapid but not entirely unenjoyable. Passed the time.

★★
My review

It would be fair to say I was an Apple “hater” for years. Purveyors of staggeringly over-priced, aesthetically pleasing gadgets with mediocre features. But they have VERY slowly won me over.

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In the last 24 hours I’ve swung back into the IndieWeb orbit. I think this was mostly prompted by a general disatisfaction with social media right now.

The last time I was here I was trying to work out how to “scrobble” tracks from Amazon Music to this site. I was trying to do this with Shortcuts on iOS and IFTTT.

This time I have been looking at how I can better share my watches from Letterboxd. I have an IFTTT applet that uses an RSS feed Trigger on my Letterboxd and uses the WordPress Action to post here. It’s not very flexible, the formatting is kind of crappy, and, as a result, all the watches are sat in Drafts, waiting to be beautified.

I have been doing a lot with Microsoft Power Automate at work recently and that got me thinking that maybe I could manipulate the data coming in from the RSS feed. I mostly rely on 3rd party tools as I am not skilled enough to whip up and deploy my own API/handle turning apps.

I started scouting around to see if I could find a tool to convert the RSS into another format that I could manipulate a bit more and then feed that into IFTTT (or w/e). I didn’t have much luck, so I thought I better have a look at IFTTT and see if there was anything I could do on their side. I couldn’t remember there being anything. Turns out IFTTT added this thing called filter code. I think the idea is, as the linked article suggests, that it gives you a bit more control of the flow. But it turns out you can basically re-write the applet. You can read the data from the Trigger and set the parameters for the Action.

I came up with a nice regex to remove the username from the feed url, so you can get a link to the movie page on Letterboxd. So, now I should be able to feed that into the Response properties for a watch. I’ll update with a link to the applet when it does exactly what I want.

At that point I was pretty happy and decided to go to bed. That was about 10pm ish. Obviously my brain didn’t fancy that so I ended up looking at my Shortcuts scrobble again… two hours later I was successful. Learned a lot of “obvious” stuff, which I’ll leave to reflect on another day.