If you have been writing a blog on Hive for any length of time you will find yourself having to do repetitive tasks in the formatting and writing of your posts. It can be a pain in the backside and slow down the creative side of what you want to do.
I use PEAKD to write most of my posts and luckily they have templates and code snippets to help me out but, it is the things I have to do before even coming to write that I find a chore and something that I needed help with.
Death by a thousand clicks
I store all my images on Flickr, on a paid account. I find it nice that I have all my images in one place for quick finding (I also have several backups). I know Hive has an image hosting facility but I also like to be able to let people see higher-resolution images if they click on the smaller images within my posts. I find it gives me more control and leads to a better presentation for my work. But oh God does it take a lot of work.
My process of creating a blog entry goes like this.
. Decide on the next piece of work to document.
. Gather together all source materials. photos on my hard drives and phone.
. Select the images I need to tell the story
. Bring all images into a photo editor and make colour adjustments, sharpen and watermark.
. Save images to Harddrive
. Upload to Flickr
. Create a new post in Peakd
. Copy snippet Template I have saved in the Snippets doohicky
. Go through all the saved images on Flickr and painstakingly select the Medium version for the post and then the Highres one to link to.
. I start writing and this takes me a few evenings of creative spurts and edits to get something that sounds comprehensible. I have mild dyslexia and so Grammarly keeps me in check.
. I then backlink to previous posts. So people can easily check out some recent ones
. Geotag the post on Pinmapple. My favourite Dapp on Hive
. Think of a title
. Choose the right tags and community
. Then click publish
It takes me quite a while and hopefully, you will understand why I am not the type of writer that pumps it out daily. I also have a busy life off-chain.
The most chorey of chores is the linking of images from Flickr. The repetitive clicking is driving me mad. I have searched and searched for ways to automate this but have never found a solution.
Enter my new friend ChatGPT
I am probably a bit late to the AI game as I hardly have enough time for real people let alone Artificial ones. But, the other evening I was talking to ChatGPT and told it of my woes.
I know very little about coding. It all seems like magic to me and the domain of spotty-faced nerds (no offence!). After a foreplay with the Language model, I stuck up a new conversation and hit it with the question.
It spit out a window of code.
What the hell was I to do with that?
I heard some nerds once talk about Python and so asked.
We were now getting somewhere. Of course not knowing the first thing about how to run Python code on my computer I asked my new buddy how to do it.
5 Minutes later I had Python installed and after some searching found PYcharm as a code editor. I felt like an imposter, pressing buttons and looking at a screen full of gobbledegook but I was not scared I had a co-Pilot.
There was a bit more back and forth with ChatGPT as we tried to debug the program (That's what the cool kids call it) I needed an API code for my Flickr account and a few other technical issues that I needed to sort out. Luckily, ChatGPT talked me though it.
The Rosetta stone
I will say that being able to use plain English to ask questions and have such a patient teacher to talk through the process made me understand how powerful ChatGPT is for this sort of thing. It did get a few things wrong along the way but after me explaining the errors I was getting it was able to correct itself.
That is one other interesting thing about the whole process, you can actually see it learning and the conversations become a near mutual education of you learning from each other.
Execute
Finally, we had achieved our goal and were able to write a program that did exactly what I wanted. Now all I have to do is fill in the URL of the album I want images from and within moments it will give me the code I need to drop into a post. Amazing! I even lost my Python virginity and with my cherry popped am ready for more adventures.
I still have some way to go before I call myself a white hat hacker but with tools like this, it shows that we need not be scared of the flashing cursor anymore.
Here is the program below in screen grabs (I can't work out how to paste it without the formatting going out of whack (If you would find a use for it I can mail it to you)).
Here are some instructions
I have learned that this is a really powerful tool and it will make my computing life a lot easier. I have already got chatGPT to help make another program to sort the video files on my computer into folders based on the name.