New product is live: 5 Minute Show Notes
It’s a super simple interface. In fact, there’s no real UI. Right now, I’ve got a landing page with two buttons that do the same thing: compose an email to transcript@5minuteshownotes.com.
From there, I process the email using my instance of N8N that I stood up. I created an alias for that account that sends the email to my main gmail account. And when I receive an email addressed to that account, I told gmail to add a specific label to that email.
In N8N, whenever gmail receives an email with that label, it triggers an automation that parses out the body of the email, the subject of the email, and the sender of the email and sends that data to a webhook on my Django server. I take the transcript of the podcast that was emailed and put it through a few transformations, splitting it up into parseable chunks, processing each chunk individually, combining the processed chunks, and creating some show notes that cover the entire episode. It’s pretty cool, honestly. It does a pretty good job, although I already see some pretty easy improvements I can make to it.
I submitted it to the hackathon and it’s open to voting. I’d really appreciate it if you could vote for me! Here’s the link to vote.
If nothing else, you should check out all the projects. There are definitely some pretty cool ones (although I have to admit I’m a little curious if they are all only a week old…).
But regardless of what happens, I had fun building it and now I’m just talking to users. I’ll get some feedback and see if it’s worth continuing, or if I’ll just use it for my own personal use so I don’t have to write show notes anymore.
The fact that I can now easily pass data from N8N to the backend and I’ve got the ability to split large text into chunks and process them in several steps is really useful to have. That’s probably the biggest thing right now, because it opens up all sorts of new options going forward.
Who Followed Me?
I’ve also been continuing to make progress on Who Followed Me?. I’ve got a couple of users right now but I had some bugs pop up and it wasn’t processing users correctly. Think I’ve gotten that ironed out now so I’m hoping users will start to get more useful data going forward. Also ended up adding some more robust logging infrastructure to the app. I hooked up Logtail, which I hadn’t used before, but was super simple to connect through Render and now I can more easily set up logging alerts, track issues when they happen, etc. And it’s free to use, which is nice, since I don’t have a ton of logs and I don’t need to keep them longer than 3 days. Mostly, I wanted to be able to track what happened while I was sleeping, because that’s when failures were happening.
New Community
Wanted to share a new community I’m starting as well. It’s called Hitchhikers to the Future and it’s a place to explore the future together. I love playing with technology and this is a starting point for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future.
If you’re interested, I’ve got a small application you can fill out and you should receive an invite! Just trying to get a feel for what people are interested in. Here’s the application.
Until next time, keep building!