This is where I'd usually comment about how the past two weeks seemed to fly by in a blink, but I'm tired of saying that so... oh crap, too late. To be fair, part of the reason the time flew by this week was me being out of town for my first offsite with Webflow. I got to meet my boss, coworkers, and learn more about our company and what our plans are for the year. I'm really happy I joined Webflow and I'm looking forward to the future. It feels like it's been a while since I could say that and damn do I appreciate having a good job.
For probably over a decade, when I wanted to make a demo/site look nice and didn't really care about making it unique, I'd go to Bootstrap. Bootstrap had a nice, clean look and as I was usually employing it for demos, or admin screens, I didn't care if it looked like every other Bootstrap site. While Bootstrap was mostly simple, it's also wordy as heck. Bootstrap has an insane love affair with div tags and even a simple Bootstrap page feels like the line number goes up 4X. Again, that's fine, but I found myself wishing for something a bit simpler. That's where the frameworks I'm sharing today come in. For the most part, these libraries require little to no work on your part. You add a CSS library (or two), and everything just gets better. You can optionally update your markup a bit, but in general, these libraries are great for the "I don't care, just make it nice and clean" approach that works great for demos and POCs.
Ok, forgive me for the incredibly over the top title there. Yes, it's clickbait, but I'm also tired after a very long week and feeling a little crazy, so just go with me here a bit, I promise it will be worth it. I was curious how well Astro could handle a large amount of data and I thought - what happens if I threw this blog (well, the Markdown files) at it and tried to render out a site? Here's what I did wrong and what eventually worked (better than I expected).
A while ago, the Gemini API added a feature to help work with URL content, URL Context. Previously you had to fetch and download the HTML of the page and pass it to the API. This feature allows Gemini to request content (with limits) from public web pages. I thought it would be interesting to test this against Reddit. In the past I've made use of Reddit's APIs, but as they've pretty much destroyed access to those APIs, I thought this could be a good work around. Here's a simple demo I built.
Happy Superb Owl Day! As my team didn't even get close to the playoffs, I'll be rooting for the Seahawks, but even more so, hoping for a fun game. Tomorrow I head out to Vegas for my first offsite with Webflow, and the first in-person company event I've been too since Auth0 nearly a decade ago. I'm looking forward to meeting my teammates in person and meeting new people. Now - to the links!
Good morning, programs! Today I'm sharing yet another example of Chrome's on-device AI features, this time to demonstrate a "Bluesky Sentiment Dashboard". In other words, a tool that lets you enter terms and then get a report on the average sentiment for posts using that word. I actually did this before (and yes, I forgot until about a minute ago) last year using Transformers.js: Building a Bluesky AI Sentiment Analysis Dashboard. I also built this for Twitter, before it went down the toilet, killed off API access, etc. etc., but I can't seem to find it in my archives so maybe I'm hallucinating. That being said, earlier this week I thought I'd try building this because honestly I had forgotten about my previous demo, but it gave me a chance to play more with Chrome's AI tooling. Interesting enough, in that post from last year I mentioned possibly adding Shoelace for UI which I actually did for this demo... so not a total waste of time, right? Let's get into it!
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