Me 2.0 version 0.1 – released + mini-summary

By | May 23, 2017

Since the beginning of march, I’m working on a pet project called Me 2.0 as a part of Get Noticed contest. Now I’m ready(ish) to release it’s the first version to the public, along with its companion app.

TL;DR: Links for the app and messenger bot are at the end of this blog post.

Goal

The goal was simple. I wanted to create simple, personal link list with some kind of suggestion mechanism that would allow sharing saved content between users with similar interests.

The idea is pretty simple (Pocket with suggestions and Pocket does have suggestions) but I focused on technologies that I’ve used and architecture rather than on complicated domain. It was mainly Akka.NET, NancyFX and some tools provided along with Azure (Cognitive Services, Microsoft Flow, Bot Framework, App Services and Azure SQL).

Completed and not (and some plans)

Storing content, tagging it and other persistence-related stuff are working well, reliable and most importantly for me – it’s fast as hell even on cheapest possible App Service tier (shared).

I wasn’t focused on frontend so it’s currently in makeshift condition. It works but it’s not pretty.

Basic suggestion mechanism is currently being tested. I haven’t managed to implement the solution I’ve wanted on time. Maybe I’ll do it in a few days. Still, on the main page of application subscribing to tags does not work at the moment(to be precise, it works but it does nothing). It’s almost done tho.

I didn’t manage to do browser extension at all. I haven’t even looked at this. Reason? Lack of time.

However, I’ve done simple bot with Microsoft Bot Framework and LUIS so it does understand natural language. At the moment you can ask it for some content on some topic and it’ll give you a specified number of links on it. I’m currently working on some better experience during using it. I must say Microsoft Bot Framework is amazing because I’ve done my “Proof of Concept” bot in one day when in the morning of said day I haven’t ever seen code related to Bot Framework at all.

I’ve also managed to feed content to my application with Microsoft Flow. I’ve blogged about that here. It’s fun, it’s outside of my app and it allows me to post fresh content from Get Noticed RSS feed and some subreddits few times a day.

I have no moderation at the moment. I’m working on something automatic and currently testing usage of Cognitive Services Content Moderator along with Microsoft Flow to automatically moderate content. It looks promising at the moment and I’ll probably implement this and .

I’m also experimenting with using Microsoft Flow, some web scraping APIs along with Cognitive Services Text Analytics API to find key phrases in stored content and match them against tags entered in the application to tag content automatically. At the moment it looks less promising than auto moderation so I’ll probably won’t continue that. It generates a lot of bullshit key phrases that doesn’t make sense at all.

And my biggest regret – it’s my another pet project without unit tests. Sadly this, frontend and browser extension are things that were postponed due to lack of time.

The last thing that I’ve wanted to do and I don’t have are aliases. At the moment tags, C# and CSharp are separate entities. Using Akka.NET actors Become method I could redirect all messages from some of them (aliases) to one with all data (main). It’s doable and it’s easy. And since it’s so easy I didn’t do it because “I’ll do it in an hour or so later” and then… I didn’t. Now I’m experimenting with automatizing it or at least suggesting to a moderator that some things should be merged.

And when I’ll do aliasing – I’ll do the same for the user account so it’ll be possible to merge twitter, facebook and google accounts into one. Then I’m going to add Facebook Messenger identity to that and use this to implement full functionality in a bot companion app. The goal is simple – everything you could do in browser UI you should be able to do via messenger window. I’ll need to polish my Bot Framework skills for that but it’s coming.

Amazing (Well…not rly)?  Where can I buy it?!

You can’t buy it. It’s free and I encourage you to try it and give me some feedback (I finally configured contact form for that). It also runs on a free trial of Azure subscription so all service tiers are lowest possible, it can start slowly if no one used it for a while  (Akka.NET based apps need half a minute or so to warm up sometimes). Truth be told it doesn’t have any business value because it wasn’t supposed to. It was meant to be fun to make it and it was. And if you really need storage for a shitload of links use Pocket, it’s amazing and since some time it does suggest other, related links too (I wonder where they’ve found idea for that 😉 ).

Also, there is no manual and there is no documentation. Writing those are boring and I won’t need them because … see business value part one paragraph above ;). Here are the links:

Links to Apps:

Feedback

It’ll be great to have some feedback from you. I’m open for good opinions, some ideas and for some criticism too. Leave a comment or contact me via:

Thanks!

 

PS. I’ll do full Get Noticed contest summary and some future plans soon.