GDD Projects

The first iteration of my Blogger Tools is published! I had fun working on this project and there is still a lot that can be added to it, but version 0.1.0 is a good start. I ran into some challenges during the project that were both fun and frustrating to solve. Take a look and feel free to leave comments. If you notice any problems or have ideas for improvements you are welcome to submit pull requests or open issues in Github. The biggest challenge that I ran into was the OAuth requirement for Blogger. If the interaction with Blogger API requires authentication, then you must be authenticated with OAuth. For public blogs an API key works fine. The use case I was developing for is with a private blog. The OAuth requirement made it very difficult to run tests and use CI. I would need to frequently manually update my access token with OAuth to run tests. Since much of what I was concerned about with testing was whether I am successfully connecting to the blog and pulling the correct

Coding with a high fever is not something I generally recommend. That doesn't stop me from doing it. I had been running a high fever for a couple of days. Between kid pick ups, sick kids, preparing meals, cleaning the house, and coding projects I could not afford to slack too much, so I kept chugging as best I could. When it comes to coding, pushing through an illness that reduces brain function is not so good. The NotifyTool I am currently working on will send emails to users on various events. I needed to select a mailer for the application. I have explored this before and I typically select SendGrid, but due to reduced cognitive function I chose MailChimp. MailChimp is excellent for running campaigns, but this is not the use case I had in mind. I could also not find a MailChimp API for Go so I decided to write the pieces I needed myself. Building my MailChimp API started okay. I got everything connecting right fairly quickly. Then I started to write tests to make sure I wa

Tools for private blogs on Blogger. I have a private blog that is shared with only a few friends. I wanted the ability to automate sending emails to the blog subscribers when I post an update. The only tools I found to do this are available only for public blogs. I decided to solve my problem, learn new things, and try my skills by building a set of tools to use with private blogs on Blogger. I'm starting with an automated email but plan to develop other tools as I have need and time. Github https://github.com/wesdean/blogger-tools This project is by no means production ready, but you are welcome to take a look at what I have so far. Programming Language: Go User Interface: Command Line Challenges so far My first challenge, of course, was finding the API I needed to work with Blogger and learning how to use it.  There is a Go API for the Google API located  here .  I had some trouble figuring out how to use it and the documentation wasn't very helpful. I de

Initial art-boards for my new website are complete! I am redesigning my website from ground up. This time round I am doing the design work myself instead of using a template or any prefabricated designs. I am, however, starting with Bootstrap and building from there. After all, I am not completely nuts and I do want to actually finish this thing and do other projects. Without further ado. Here are the art-boards! Enjoy and comment! GDD Website Art-Boards