Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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I’ve been using the PeakFinder app for a month or two now. It is a nice app for showing what hills are in view. Basically it give a ‘live’ wireframe of hilsl from your location or anywhere you like. All the features are listed PeakFinder App.

Today I opened the app and it must have been updated, because it gave me a message saying:

Augmented reality
For a long time many of you have asked for an option to combine the image of the camera with the panorama drawing. l’ve finally implemented this feature in this newest version and so PeakFinder now also supports true augmented reality.

This is quite amazing, and in my tests it works a treat.

I think this is the first AR I’ve seen that makes be think this could really be useful and soon. It is not much of a stretch to imagine a botany app that can recognise flowers.

What is cool about peakfinder is that the data is loaded so that you do not need a connection to use the application.

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Micro.blog 1.1 is out and is a lovely application. I really like mobile apps that are elegantly simple.

Even if you don’t use micro.blog it is worth watching the screencast

Using the micro.blog app for a few months has made me think about blogging from both technical and philosophical (not really sure if that is the right word) points of view.

The one of the main new feature of the app is support for longer posts and this leads to this test.

My own blog has developed layers of ‘cruft’ over the years and I’ve made a fair tangle in trying to separate micro/status posts from longer ones.

I’ve now added a function or two to my blog which will look for a particular piece of text ‘wwwd’ with colons around it. If it finds it the posts format should be changed to standard and the category wwwd added. This should mean I can post longer posts, like this one, to the front page of my blog from the micro.blog app. Here goes…

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AudioBoom is closing its free tier:

If you take no action, then after 2nd October 2017, you will no longer be able to upload new content and your account will become private. We will continue to enable distribution of your existing content for a period of a month so all your RSS feeds and web embeds will continue to work for that period. If you choose to move to another podcast provider, let us know by emailing us at support@audioboom.com and we will redirect your RSS feeds for you. We’ll need at least 5 working days to comply with your request. After 36 months from 30th August 2017, your account will be deleted (including your old podcasts and your RSS feeds, so we recommend that you arrange for redirection of your RSS feeds, download your old podcasts and back them up elsewhere, before that period expires.

from: Subscription Changes

Which is depressing news for me and for Edutalk. I have 50 odd boos which range over field recording, audio recorded for Edutalk and some microcast type posts. Edutalk has had several hundred contributions from many different people over the years.

The situation at Edutalk is more worrying. I could pay $9.99 a month to keep my own account alive. But Edutalk has had contributions from many different people, we could not expect them to pay up for the privilege of having their content syndicated onto Edutalk.

AudioBoom did not provide any export that would help with importing into WordPress (or anything else). This differs from the posterous closedown which did give a WordPress export option.

We do have a while to sort this out. There is a month until the accounts become private.

AudioBoom does have an API, and we used it before.

I am not intending to rush, so this is the plan.

  1. Download the information about the posts using the API
  2. Download all the mp3s by parsing the JSON the api provides.
  3. Delete all the posts on edutalk that have been syndicated from AudioBoom.
  4. Upload all the mp3s
  5. Create posts that embed all these mp3s with the matching titles and descriptions etc.

Today I managed to download the json files and the mp3 I used AppleScript as I find it easier to get stuff done with that than pure shell scripting.

Thank goodness for the JSON helper for AppleScript which worked a treat.

I’ve put the script here:


set downloadfolder to "/Users/john/Desktop/audioboom/edutalk/"
–so this next bit could be a loop but doing it manual was not much of a hassle
set pagecount to 9
set tag to "edutalk"
set itemcount to 100
tell application "JSON Helper"
set bURL to "https://api.audioboom.com/tag/" & tag & "/audio_clips?page[items]=" & itemcount & "&page[number]=" & pagecount
set boos to fetch JSON from bURL
set myFile to open for access "Macintosh HD:Users:john:Desktop:audioboom:edutalk_" & pagecount & ".json" with write permission
set boohoo to make JSON from boos
write boohoo to myFile
close access myFile
set imageCount to count of audio_clips of body of boos
set mp3urls to {}
repeat with boo in audio_clips of body of boos
set end of mp3urls to high_mp3 of urls of boo
end repeat
end tell
repeat with mp3 in mp3urls
set cmd to "curl -L " & mp3 & " > " & downloadfolder & filenamefromurl(mp3)
do shell script cmd
end repeat
return cmd
on filenamefromurl(theurl)
set s to "url=\"" & theurl & "\"; echo \"${url##*/}\""
return do shell script s
end filenamefromurl

view raw

downloadboos.scpt

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

in case anyone is interested.

I had to run it 10 times, I guess I could have just made a loop but as I ended up downloading 890 mp3 for a total of 2.6 GB batches of 100 files at a time seemed like a good idea.

I am a wee bit worried that there are 2186 posts syndicated from audioboo on the Edutalk site, but there does seem to be a lot of duplication presumably caused by FeedWordPress.

Next Steps

I’ve now got all of the data and the mp3 files I can get.

I know how to post to WordPress from AppleScript, but I’ve discovered a couple of hurdles. I don’t seem to be able to add an enclosure with AppleScript and I can’t see how to ad multiple tags to a post.

The first is probably not a problem. These posts are all so old that they will not feature in our RSS feed. I would like to include all of the tags. I may end up creating a WordPress export file or try one of the csv import plugins. There is now not such a rush. I can test these approaches on this blog with my own boos.

I guess the main lesson to be learnt here is about the temporary nature of the free layer of the web. The AudioBoo app and service were wonderful in their day but reliance on free services costs.

The featured images is a gif captured with Licecap, of a mp3 download.

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Last week I posted about the end of Flash, one of the thing I regretted was the loss of a tool to teach animation.
This week I noticed Wick: The Internet’s Free and Open-Source Creation Toolkit. This  works best with Firefox and Chrome. It make javascript animations that can be exported as a webpage. I’ve put one in the iFrame below.

Direct link: jj-test-wick

It looks like you can do a lot of cleave stuff with JavaScript, byr the editor supports the use of motion tweens and clips that can have their own timelines and tweens without any scripting.

My skills in this department are limited, but if you look closely you will see the person in the animation is moving his arms and legs. They are a clip.

The flash vacuum is being filled before it exists.