037 — No Waves

Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play podcast. I tried recording this episode for the last two weeks. Originally, not this last Thursday, but the Thursday before, I was trying to get it recorded before I headed out the door to go go with my family to the lake for the weekend, and it turns out my microphone was not on.

So I kinda scrapped that recording. I tried to record it a couple times last week. I tried to do one late at night. I realized that I was overly umming on everything, and I'll try to be a little bit more conscious about that today, but we'll see how that goes. So tried to record one last week.

I was a little bit scattered, and I was all over the place. I was also just trying to remember, like, what was going on, what was I trying to get out of my head that Thursday prior, and then what I was trying to basically do that week. So it was a little bit all over the place. But the one thing I can tell you is the week prior to us going to the lake, you know, I was trying to get some stuff going on Open Graphs, and that's at opengraphs.com if you're curious. I was basically just trying to get some stuff going.

I was, like, working on both the the marketing side and then also thinking about basically getting some tools out that I could get some people that would be useful both for myself, but also useful for other people to use at the site before I actually have the full offering up and also just continuing to evolve the OpenGraph image renderer that actually is, like, responsible for generating the the, you know, the images live. So far, that's been working good. I rolled out some optimizations to that. And, again, it's it's currently integrated on two of two of my sites at ryanheffner.com and allplay.fm. And I'm gonna be rolling that out to even more sites as well as also using it on opengraphs.com, the site itself, as I roll out more pages and update and optimize that site, you know, as I try to get it ready for the launch.

So I was working on that. Everything was going good. Actually, it was interesting integrating Open graphs into allplay.fm because I started navigating the site and playing around, and I realized that my audio player wasn't working on allplay.fm. And not to say that that's the biggest thing. That site doesn't really get that much traffic.

I'm sure it doesn't really account. Or even when the player was working, it wasn't counting for that many plays, but it turns out that the way that I was requesting the m p three file was no longer supported via the, the hosting platform that I'm using. For whatever reason, it seems to, not allow that request to go through. And I was use the reason why I was doing it in a slightly different format is because I actually wanted to render the waveform of the audio before I then played it back. But it was all done in the same single request.

It wasn't like it was, one request for the waveform, one request to play the audio. So it wasn't like, artificially incrementing the playback numbers nor was it somehow bypassing any sort of, like, limits or, you know, counts or whatever that would somehow keep me under my quota, which I'm I'm well under for the for the plan that I'm on on transistor.fm. But regardless, I had to basically go in and refactor the way that the player works. It was actually probably a good thing because I wanted to move it more towards, like, an audio tag instance. I was using a lot of the web API before.

And the one thing I realized with that is that when you're using the web API, depending on how you initiate the playback, it doesn't always remain playing when that when that screen is locked or when you exit out of the browser or something like that. So that was, kind of like a good change. Actually, I I still need to test the the browser stuff. I I know it was working when I locked it with Safari Focus, but I'm not a 100% sure whether it was working if I left Safari and if the playback remained playing. I don't think that was the case.

Have to check. Anyways, not the point. So, basically, you'll see no waveforms on the site, and that's also why this episode is called no waves. I feel like it's kind of like a little bit of a metaphor where how I've been feeling lately. You know, it's it's kind of even like when I when I first started surfing back in when I was in New York, I would go out on days when no one would be out there.

It would be on, like, bad flat days, but I just wanted to get out there. I just wanted to paddle around. I wanted to get comfortable on my board. And and sure enough, I was there when the the waves were good and and all that kind of like paddling around and just like trying to battle for these like smaller waves. Probably it definitely helped for when, some of the bigger waves showed up, but no waves.

You know? It's kinda similar to, like, Justin Jackson when he talks about with you have to be in the right spot with the right waves. You just go out and paddle. Right now, I feel like I'm paddling. I'm not a 100% sure if there's gonna be a wave that's gonna come through.

I'm trying to look at the forecast. I'm not sure where it's gonna get me, but I'm trying to make progress. And I'm just getting out there, and I'm paddling around. I'm gonna try to figure out where those waves are. So speaking of Justin Jackson, I actually took advantage of, an opportunity where the Justin Jackson and Brian Castle have a podcast called the panel, and they do that or they've been recently doing it, every Thursday at, 3PM in the afternoon.

That's, on, like, eastern time. But you can they're doing it live, also a live show. And last week, Brian was actually on vacation, so I ended up taking, the opportunity to DM Justin on Blue Sky and see if he wanted to do a quick jam session episode. So he did. We did it on his channel.

I don't I mean, I think it it went okay. I I could have showed up better. I think I just didn't really come with a lot of heat. I didn't come with a lot of, ideas and and and stuff to throw at it, but I think it still was it was a pretty good episode. So check that out.

That's over on his channel. I'll make sure I link that in the show notes. But hopefully, I'll have more conversations with him. I'm really interested in everything that Transistor is doing in their podcasting space and also how to push the push the standard a little bit. I actually explored some of the podcasting stuff back in the day on another project, and I kinda wanna rekindle that in some future stuff.

But, again, not not trying to stay somewhat focused and gonna focus on getting Open Graphs out. Can I get back to Sky Lounge at some point? It's kinda I've kinda have that one on hold at this point because I was time trying to time box that for for May, and I just kinda missed the the box. And I just don't know don't have a very clear vision about what the long term goal for that is, but I can see, obviously, a very short term milestone for OpenGraphs. I also will be using OpenGraphs on Skylounge as well as on starterpacks.net.

So it's a good foundational thing that I can be focused on, and that's why I'm trying to push through. But I'm also in the wake of getting the final thing done. And as I kind of test it more and do more more exploration and actually work on some resources for the site, I'm learning more and more about actually the OpenGraph spec and also the the kind of limited implementations that a lot of sites seems to use. You know, it's like the fact that most sites only render a single image when technically the spec supports you could have an array of images. So, like, the fact that you could potentially have carousels where your links are shared is an interesting thing.

I don't know. I think there's a lot of stuff that could be done to push the standard forward and maybe having a system that allows you to have better control over that as well as maybe, who knows, tools that publishers could use to better surface and navigate that information could be interesting. So it's got my mind spinning, and, I don't know. It's all good stuff for, as I explore Open Graphs and work on opengraphs.com. I have been working on a browser extension.

I started that last Wednesday, and I thought it was gonna be, you know, like, within two hours, I basically had a an initial Chrome extension version that was working. It was using this new side panel format for it, which is really cool because essentially the extension remains open and accessible as you navigate around a site or different sites as well as different tabs and stuff. So I wanna have, basically, I think the actual first released software that I'm gonna have for OpenGraphs is gonna be a browser extension. The one thing that's a little bit wild is the kind of, it's it's a wild wild west as far as the actual experience of extensions across various browsers, whether it's Chrome based browsers or Firefox or whatever else. There's a new standard, at least for Chrome, to have it in the Chrome web store, which is the you have to have the manifest v three.

Not trying to get into specifics here, but that offers stuff like side panel and these other things that doesn't seem to be supported in Firefox. And when you try to basically have a side panel first extension that kind of breaks the way that things work in Firefox. So this dream of having a single extension that you can write and deploy for, like, Chrome and Firefox and, you know, obvious some you know, Safari is a whole another thing because there's Xcode project and stuff. But the the dream of being able to have this one thing that you write and deploy everywhere is not quite there. And even even is a kind of a mess across other Chrome based browsers like ARC or Dia and all these other ones that are based on Chrome because they're all implement the their handling of extensions slightly differently.

So a lot of learning there. I'm gonna try to just remain focused and get the first kind of, like, Chrome, like, regular Chrome optimized one out there, and then I'll figure out how to kind of break out my code in the code base. Thankfully, it's all within a mono repo. So I think I will be able to reuse a lot of the stuff that's in the one and then just kind of change the manifest, change the way that the extension is triggered and a few other ones, then I can should be able to get that on on the Firefox fine and also have it work in these, I guess, non side panel supported Chrome versions of of browsers, but gonna try to get that out there. So I'm over my ten minutes.

Needless to say, I'm I'm trying to make progress. I think things are going okay on OpenGraphs. I'm I'm gonna try to get this browser extension out and get another tool actually out on the site itself just as a way to kind of start building up the pages, start building up, shared around, maybe people start using it and see where things go as I continue to build out the actual main app and the APIs and all this other stuff. But the more that I'm exploring and just researching OpenGraphs in general, the OpenGraph protocol, it is giving me more ideas and ways that I think I can both make OpenGraphs better as well as creating some more tools that will help allow others to take advantage of the protocol to its full extent. So gonna leave it there.

I'm Ryan Hefner. This is the All Play podcast. You can find episodes at allplay.fm. The player should be working. If they are not, please let me know.

DM me on, blue sky or straight at me or whatever. And yeah. And if you're liking these episodes and if you are subscribing or whatever, I would love, you know, like, a a rating or review or whatever. Just, let me know that you're there and and if this is valuable or not. But, I guess, from there, I'll just play out.

Oh, man. Let me try this again. Alright. Have a great one. Later.