037 — No Waves

Or, you can watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iU2PMrYUNIQ

After attempting and failing to get an episode out the last couple of weeks, I am happy to say that I finally recorded one, and I am getting it out early this week.

A lot of stuff has happened over the last 2.5 weeks, so here’s a quick run down, along with links:

Optimizations were made to the https://www.opengraphs.com renderer, that is currently powering the open graph image generation for both https://www.allplay.fm and https://www.ryanhefner.com

While integrating OpenGraphs into the All Play site, I noticed the audio players were no longer playing anymore, so after a bit of back-and-forth with Transistor (https://www.transistor.fm), I decided to rip out the custom waveform generation stuff I was doing and just play the mp3 directly in an `audio` tag. Hence, No Waves. I do plan on getting back to a solution for adding the waveforms back, but for the sake of getting things working, and working on other stuff, this quick hack will have to do. Probably a lesson in there about focusing on the right things, and how not everything has to be bespoke and custom built.

Along that front, the whole No Waves thing got me thinking about Justin Jackson’s (https://justinjackson.ca) analogy about finding the right wave, and how I feel the same way trying to find the right product and revenue generator as I did back in the day when I started surfing. Heading out on the crap days to get more comfortable with my board and doing a lot of paddling to get into shitty waves, but all that time in the water and paddling made it easier for me to catch waves when I would eventually get out on the good days and was presented with good waves.

Speaking of Justin Jackson, I was able to snag some time with him last Thursday for an impromptu Jam Sessions episode. I was feeling a little off in this one, but have a watch and let me know what you think: https://www.youtube.com/live/2_nuzJa3AJ0?si=JYB2WWNhlMphWu14

On the OpenGraphs front, I have been busy making a few optimizations to the render, but mostly focusing on the marketing site and building some tools, and browser extensions (!) to launch before the full offering is available. And, a side note, the current state of browser extension development somehow feels even more fragmented and disjointed than ever, but I’ll save my thoughts and issues there for another episode.

The goal this week is to get the browser extension submitted to at least one of the stores/directories this week, along with updates to the OpenGraphs marketing site to support it/them. And, get one—maybe two!—tools deployed to the site as well. My thinking is that if I can start to bake in some early tools that are nice and people like to use, hopefully that will keep people coming back, subscribing to the newsletter, and aware as new stuff keeps rolling out to the site, leading up to the full-on service becoming available. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes as things progress.

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment  #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

Episode Transcript

Ryan (00:15):
Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All
Play podcast. I tried recordingthis episode for the last two
weeks. Originally, not this lastThursday, but the Thursday
before, I was trying to get itrecorded before I headed out the
door to go go with my family tothe lake for the weekend, and it

(00:36):
turns out my microphone was noton.
So I kinda scrapped thatrecording. I tried to record it
a couple times last week. Itried to do one late at night. I
realized that I was overlyumming on everything, and I'll
try to be a little bit moreconscious about that today, but
we'll see how that goes. Sotried to record one last week.
I was a little bit scattered,and I was all over the place. I

(00:57):
was also just trying toremember, like, what was going
on, what was I trying to get outof my head that Thursday prior,
and then what I was trying tobasically do that week. So it
was a little bit all over theplace. But the one thing I can
tell you is the week prior to usgoing to the lake, you know, I
was trying to get some stuffgoing on Open Graphs, and that's

(01:20):
at opengraphs.com if you'recurious. I was basically just
trying to get some stuff going.
I was, like, working on both thethe marketing side and then also
thinking about basically gettingsome tools out that I could get
some people that would be usefulboth for myself, but also useful
for other people to use at thesite before I actually have the
full offering up and also justcontinuing to evolve the

(01:43):
OpenGraph image renderer thatactually is, like, responsible
for generating the the, youknow, the images live. So far,
that's been working good. Irolled out some optimizations to
that. And, again, it's it'scurrently integrated on two of
two of my sites atryanheffner.com and allplay.fm.
And I'm gonna be rolling thatout to even more sites as well

(02:04):
as also using it onopengraphs.com, the site itself,
as I roll out more pages andupdate and optimize that site,
you know, as I try to get itready for the launch.
So I was working on that.Everything was going good.
Actually, it was interestingintegrating Open graphs into
allplay.fm because I startednavigating the site and playing

(02:25):
around, and I realized that myaudio player wasn't working on
allplay.fm. And not to say thatthat's the biggest thing. That
site doesn't really get thatmuch traffic.
I'm sure it doesn't reallyaccount. Or even when the player
was working, it wasn't countingfor that many plays, but it
turns out that the way that Iwas requesting the m p three
file was no longer supported viathe, the hosting platform that

(02:48):
I'm using. For whatever reason,it seems to, not allow that
request to go through. And I wasuse the reason why I was doing
it in a slightly differentformat is because I actually
wanted to render the waveform ofthe audio before I then played
it back. But it was all done inthe same single request.
It wasn't like it was, onerequest for the waveform, one

(03:08):
request to play the audio. So itwasn't like, artificially
incrementing the playbacknumbers nor was it somehow
bypassing any sort of, like,limits or, you know, counts or
whatever that would somehow keepme under my quota, which I'm I'm
well under for the for the planthat I'm on on transistor.fm.

(03:31):
But regardless, I had tobasically go in and refactor the
way that the player works. Itwas actually probably a good
thing because I wanted to moveit more towards, like, an audio
tag instance. I was using a lotof the web API before.
And the one thing I realizedwith that is that when you're
using the web API, depending onhow you initiate the playback,
it doesn't always remain playingwhen that when that screen is

(03:55):
locked or when you exit out ofthe browser or something like
that. So that was, kind of likea good change. Actually, I I
still need to test the thebrowser stuff. I I know it was
working when I locked it withSafari Focus, but I'm not a 100%
sure whether it was working if Ileft Safari and if the playback

(04:15):
remained playing. I don't thinkthat was the case.
Have to check. Anyways, not thepoint. So, basically, you'll see
no waveforms on the site, andthat's also why this episode is
called no waves. I feel likeit's kind of like a little bit
of a metaphor where how I'vebeen feeling lately. You know,
it's it's kind of even like whenI when I first started surfing

(04:39):
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 flatdays, but I just wanted to get
out there. I just wanted topaddle around. I wanted to get
comfortable on my board. And andsure enough, I was there when
the the waves were good and andall that kind of like paddling
around and just like trying tobattle for these like smaller

(05:01):
waves. Probably it definitelyhelped for when, some of the
bigger waves showed up, but nowaves.
You know? It's kinda similar to,like, Justin Jackson when he
talks about with you have to bein the right spot with the right
waves. You just go out andpaddle. 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 theforecast. I'm not sure where

(05:23):
it's gonna get me, but I'mtrying to make progress. And I'm
just getting out there, and I'mpaddling around. I'm gonna try
to figure out where those wavesare. So speaking of Justin
Jackson, I actually tookadvantage of, an opportunity
where the Justin Jackson andBrian Castle have a podcast
called the panel, and they dothat or they've been recently

(05:46):
doing it, every Thursday at, 3PMin the afternoon.
That's, on, like, eastern time.But you can they're doing it
live, also a live show. And lastweek, Brian was actually on
vacation, so I ended up taking,the opportunity to DM Justin on
Blue Sky and see if he wanted todo a quick jam session episode.

(06:06):
So he did. We did it on hischannel.
I don't I mean, I think it itwent okay. I I could have showed
up better. I think I just didn'treally come with a lot of heat.
I didn't come with a lot of,ideas and and and stuff to throw

(06:27):
at it, but I think it still wasit was a pretty good episode. So
check that out.
That's over on his channel. I'llmake sure I link that in the
show notes. But hopefully, I'llhave more conversations with
him. I'm really interested ineverything that Transistor is
doing in their podcasting spaceand also how to push the push
the standard a little bit. Iactually explored some of the

(06:50):
podcasting stuff back in the dayon another project, and I kinda
wanna rekindle that in somefuture stuff.
But, again, not not trying tostay somewhat focused and gonna
focus on getting Open Graphsout. Can I get back to Sky
Lounge at some point? It's kindaI've kinda have that one on hold
at this point because I was timetrying to time box that for for

(07:11):
May, and I just kinda missed thethe box. And I just don't know
don't have a very clear visionabout what the long term goal
for that is, but I can see,obviously, a very short term
milestone for OpenGraphs. I alsowill be using OpenGraphs on

(07:34):
Skylounge as well as onstarterpacks.net.
So it's a good foundationalthing that I can be focused on,
and that's why I'm trying topush through. But I'm also in
the wake of getting the finalthing done. And as I kind of
test it more and do more moreexploration and actually work on
some resources for the site, I'mlearning more and more about

(07:56):
actually the OpenGraph spec andalso the the kind of limited
implementations that a lot ofsites seems to use. You know,
it's like the fact that mostsites only render a single image
when technically the specsupports you could have an array
of images. So, like, the factthat you could potentially have
carousels where your links areshared is an interesting thing.

(08:18):
I don't know. I think there's alot of stuff that could be done
to push the standard forward andmaybe having a system that
allows you to have bettercontrol over that as well as
maybe, who knows, tools thatpublishers could use to better
surface and navigate thatinformation could be
interesting. So it's got my mindspinning, and, I don't know.

(08:41):
It's all good stuff for, as Iexplore Open Graphs and work on
opengraphs.com. I have beenworking on a browser extension.
I started that last Wednesday,and I thought it was gonna be,
you know, like, within twohours, I basically had a an
initial Chrome extension versionthat was working. It was using
this new side panel format forit, which is really cool because

(09:04):
essentially the extensionremains open and accessible as
you navigate around a site ordifferent sites as well as
different tabs and stuff. So Iwanna have, basically, I think
the actual first releasedsoftware that I'm gonna have for
OpenGraphs is gonna be a browserextension. The one thing that's
a little bit wild is the kindof, it's it's a wild wild west

(09:27):
as far as the actual experienceof extensions across various
browsers, whether it's Chromebased browsers or Firefox or
whatever else. There's a newstandard, at least for Chrome,
to have it in the Chrome webstore, which is the you have to
have the manifest v three.
Not trying to get into specificshere, but that offers stuff like

(09:50):
side panel and these otherthings that doesn't seem to be
supported in Firefox. And whenyou try to basically have a side
panel first extension that kindof breaks the way that things
work in Firefox. So this dreamof having a single extension
that you can write and deployfor, like, Chrome and Firefox

(10:11):
and, you know, obvious some youknow, Safari is a whole another
thing because there's Xcodeproject and stuff. But the the
dream of being able to have thisone thing that you write and
deploy everywhere is not quitethere. And even even is a kind
of a mess across other Chromebased browsers like ARC or Dia
and all these other ones thatare based on Chrome because

(10:34):
they're all implement the theirhandling of extensions slightly
differently.
So a lot of learning there. I'mgonna try to just remain focused
and get the first kind of, like,Chrome, like, regular Chrome
optimized one out there, andthen I'll figure out how to kind
of break out my code in the codebase. Thankfully, it's all

(10:56):
within a mono repo. So I think Iwill be able to reuse a lot of
the stuff that's in the one andthen just kind of change the
manifest, change the way thatthe extension is triggered and a
few other ones, then I canshould be able to get that on on
the Firefox fine and also haveit work in these, I guess, non
side panel supported Chromeversions of of browsers, but

(11:20):
gonna try to get that out there.So I'm over my ten minutes.
Needless to say, I'm I'm tryingto make progress. I think things
are going okay on OpenGraphs.I'm I'm gonna try to get this
browser extension out and getanother tool actually out on the
site itself just as a way tokind of start building up the

(11:42):
pages, start building up, sharedaround, maybe people start using
it and see where things go as Icontinue to build out the actual
main app and the APIs and allthis other stuff. But the more
that I'm exploring and justresearching OpenGraphs in
general, the OpenGraph protocol,it is giving me more ideas and

(12:05):
ways that I think I can bothmake OpenGraphs better as well
as creating some more tools thatwill help allow others to take
advantage of the protocol to itsfull extent. So gonna leave it
there.
I'm Ryan Hefner. This is the AllPlay podcast. You can find
episodes at allplay.fm. Theplayer should be working. If
they are not, please let meknow.

(12:26):
DM me on, blue sky or straightat me or whatever. And yeah. And
if you're liking these episodesand if you are subscribing or
whatever, I would love, youknow, like, a a rating or review
or whatever. Just, let me knowthat you're there and and if
this is valuable or not. But, Iguess, from there, I'll just

(12:49):
play out.
Oh, man. Let me try this again.Alright. Have a great one.

(13:19):
Later.