My first 3 blog posts here on Gunkholing Bottomfeeders were kinda not really blog posts.
The first post is from 2012. I was teaching myself Android programming and I had quite a few videos of performances at the Vera project, where I volunteered frequently.
I decided to build an app that would play my videos of bands at the Vera Project on your phone.
I figured out how to make that work with an awful UI - buttons all over the place, each for a different video, and you paged through the buttons. I had lots of videos, already in the hundreds back in 2012, so it was interesting. At least to me. I also added some buttons to get to the Vera Project Donation page, and info and links to tickets for upcoming shows.
I got it working, coded and hosted the back end on Google's App Engine, which had the most usable free tier at the time. I got an Android Developer account for $25, the only part of this that was not free. Well, not free in terms of money, Android dev tools, the SDK and Eclipse are all free. The time I put in recording videos and posting them and writing the app wasn't free, but it was fun and I learned all kinds of useful things.
Useful things like how to program and publish an Android app; Vera Video has been available since 2012 (closing in on five years as I write this) and has been installed a bit over 5,700 times total.
To make the list of upcoming shows work I had to provide a back end with a master list and have the application check in once a day to get the latest list. I also added a bit that allowed me to add more Vera Project videos to the phone apps on the fly. I "versioned" the lists, and the phone app would report it's version when asking for the latest list of shows. If the version was out of date, code on the backend would add a list of all the new videos and their details to the response with the 5 upcoming shows, and the ugly UI would have even more pages of buttons that all show different Vera Project live music videos. I didn't maintain these for very long, manual updates to App Engine and Data Store are tedious and boring,
When I went to publish the application I found that I had to post a privacy statement on the internet to link to from the Android Play Store. Finally I have reached the point of the story, that took a bit. The first post from 2012 is the privacy statement I linked to from the Google App Store.
VeraVideo is still on the app store, so you can check it out if you feel like it. You can also find it on the Google Play Store by searching for VeraVideo. I'm not sure if it even works anymore, but it's tiny and it shouldn't do any harm. Let me know in the comments if you tried it and whether it works.
The second post is less interesting technically and a bit bloody. I store photos of shows in Flickr and I wanted to blog about a particular photo that was mildly bloody.
This was from a live performance and shows don't get bloody much anyway, even at punk or heavy metal shows. I noticed that Flickr allowed me to "post the photo to a blog" and I wanted to try that. I didn't want some funky one-off posting messing up my music blog, so I pointed it at the inactive (except for the privacy statement two years earlier) blog and tried it. The second blog post is the result. I ended up blogging on my music blog the way I always do, didn't find the flickr feature that useful. Good photo, anyway.
The third post I introduce my vision and what I expect to blog about. More of an explanation and introduction to the blog than a blog post, to some degree.
That brings us to this, the fourth blog post and the first one that is really and completely a blog post. Hopefully this is a trend and from here on out there will be plenty of actual blog posts coming up, In any event, thanks for hang in there and reading the whole blog post!
The first post is from 2012. I was teaching myself Android programming and I had quite a few videos of performances at the Vera project, where I volunteered frequently.
I decided to build an app that would play my videos of bands at the Vera Project on your phone.
I figured out how to make that work with an awful UI - buttons all over the place, each for a different video, and you paged through the buttons. I had lots of videos, already in the hundreds back in 2012, so it was interesting. At least to me. I also added some buttons to get to the Vera Project Donation page, and info and links to tickets for upcoming shows.
UI By Engineer (me), Ouch!
I got it working, coded and hosted the back end on Google's App Engine, which had the most usable free tier at the time. I got an Android Developer account for $25, the only part of this that was not free. Well, not free in terms of money, Android dev tools, the SDK and Eclipse are all free. The time I put in recording videos and posting them and writing the app wasn't free, but it was fun and I learned all kinds of useful things.
Useful things like how to program and publish an Android app; Vera Video has been available since 2012 (closing in on five years as I write this) and has been installed a bit over 5,700 times total.
To make the list of upcoming shows work I had to provide a back end with a master list and have the application check in once a day to get the latest list. I also added a bit that allowed me to add more Vera Project videos to the phone apps on the fly. I "versioned" the lists, and the phone app would report it's version when asking for the latest list of shows. If the version was out of date, code on the backend would add a list of all the new videos and their details to the response with the 5 upcoming shows, and the ugly UI would have even more pages of buttons that all show different Vera Project live music videos. I didn't maintain these for very long, manual updates to App Engine and Data Store are tedious and boring,
When I went to publish the application I found that I had to post a privacy statement on the internet to link to from the Android Play Store. Finally I have reached the point of the story, that took a bit. The first post from 2012 is the privacy statement I linked to from the Google App Store.
VeraVideo is still on the app store, so you can check it out if you feel like it. You can also find it on the Google Play Store by searching for VeraVideo. I'm not sure if it even works anymore, but it's tiny and it shouldn't do any harm. Let me know in the comments if you tried it and whether it works.
The second post is less interesting technically and a bit bloody. I store photos of shows in Flickr and I wanted to blog about a particular photo that was mildly bloody.
This was from a live performance and shows don't get bloody much anyway, even at punk or heavy metal shows. I noticed that Flickr allowed me to "post the photo to a blog" and I wanted to try that. I didn't want some funky one-off posting messing up my music blog, so I pointed it at the inactive (except for the privacy statement two years earlier) blog and tried it. The second blog post is the result. I ended up blogging on my music blog the way I always do, didn't find the flickr feature that useful. Good photo, anyway.
The third post I introduce my vision and what I expect to blog about. More of an explanation and introduction to the blog than a blog post, to some degree.
That brings us to this, the fourth blog post and the first one that is really and completely a blog post. Hopefully this is a trend and from here on out there will be plenty of actual blog posts coming up, In any event, thanks for hang in there and reading the whole blog post!
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