WAYWO This Week
(05/01/15–11/01/15)
Summarizing the pursuits-in-progress of the brightest and best.
Hackers are always working on something new. WAYWO — What are you working on?
Click a title to view the original WAYWO post for each project.
1. Page Unliker: Clean preteen mistakes from your newsfeed
We’ve all made the mistake of clicking the like button on an immature Facebook page, only to bear the evidence, forgotten, until the end of time. Don’t you wish there was an easy way to find and unlike all those embarrassing pages from yesteryear?
Iheanyi Ekechukwu comes to the rescue with Page Unliker. Just sign in with Facebook, and Page Unliker will show you all of the pages you’ve ever liked, beginning with the oldest. From there, you can easily unlike all of the pages you’d like to forget about. Time to remove yourself from all of those annoying “If we get 1,000,000 likes BLANK will happen” pages.
Page Unliker is a “mad basic” Ember.js application with no backend at all. That means your Facebook data stays private and safe. Check out Page Unliker here, or contribute the the project on GitHub.
2. RapGenerator: Mash your favourite lyrics
- Scrape 500 rap songs on RapGenius.
- Randomly smash lines together.
- You’re beginning to feel like a Rap God.
RapGenerator is the work of Rõhith Varanasi and Paul Vorobyev, with design by Ben Zweig. Each time the user clicks the “New Rap” button, lines from hundreds of popular songs are randomly combined to create an original composition. You can imagine the results.
The application is made with Node.js, Express and EJS templating. RapGenerator currently copies entire lines as-is without regard for rhyme or meter, but future versions could address these limitations. What about using a Markov chain, Rõhith?
If you want to check out the source code, you can find it here on GitHub.
Warning: “The lyrics may be explicit.”
3. TeX Embed: Easy LaTeX images
Let’s face it: HHackers can get a little “nerdy” sometimes. Sometimes you’ve just got to embed an equation on a website. I can appreciate that. What I can’t appreciate is the tediousness of writing the equation in LaTeX, saving the result as an image, and finally including the result as HTML.
Fret no longer, because TeX Embed does all the work for you. Just create your image with the following simple HTML:
<img src="http://texembed.ian.pw/[LaTeX equation]" />Just replace [LaTeX equation] with something like “e^{i %5Cpi} + 1 = 0,” and you’re done.
TeX Embed was made by Ian Macalinao with (shockingly few lines of) Node.js and Express. Here’s the source code.
4. Ideaboard: Quick, crowdsourced ideation
Suppose you’re the developer of a popular extensible productivity application. How do you figure out which features to add next? If you’re Nate Parrott, you build a tool to collect suggestions directly from your users.
Ideaboard was created to collect ideas for future plugins for Flashlight, a turbo-charged replacement for Spotlight or Alfred. The interface is extremely intuitive: add an idea at the bottom of the page, and click on the bubble next to an idea to upvote it. No frills, just quick democratic feedback.
Ideaboard uses Firebase on the backend and React on the frontend. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the source code (care to share, Nate?).
Want to be featured?
Are you working on something cool? Post about it in the WAYWO group and you could be the next one to be featured!
