037 — No Waves

All Play w/ Ryan Hefner

Or, you can watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iU2PMrYUNIQ

After attempting and failing to get an episode out the last couple of weeks, I am happy to say that I finally recorded one, and I am getting it out early this week.

A lot of stuff has happened over the last 2.5 weeks, so here’s a quick run down, along with links:

Optimizations were made to the https://www.opengraphs.com renderer, that is currently powering the open graph image generation for both https://www.allplay.fm and https://www.ryanhefner.com

While integrating OpenGraphs into the All Play site, I noticed the audio players were no longer playing anymore, so after a bit of back-and-forth with Transistor (https://www.transistor.fm), I decided to rip out the custom waveform generation stuff I was doing and just play the mp3 directly in an `audio` tag. Hence, No Waves. I do plan on getting back to a solution for adding the waveforms back, but for the sake of getting things working, and working on other stuff, this quick hack will have to do. Probably a lesson in there about focusing on the right things, and how not everything has to be bespoke and custom built.

Along that front, the whole No Waves thing got me thinking about Justin Jackson’s (https://justinjackson.ca) analogy about finding the right wave, and how I feel the same way trying to find the right product and revenue generator as I did back in the day when I started surfing. Heading out on the crap days to get more comfortable with my board and doing a lot of paddling to get into shitty waves, but all that time in the water and paddling made it easier for me to catch waves when I would eventually get out on the good days and was presented with good waves.

Speaking of Justin Jackson, I was able to snag some time with him last Thursday for an impromptu Jam Sessions episode. I was feeling a little off in this one, but have a watch and let me know what you think: https://www.youtube.com/live/2_nuzJa3AJ0?si=JYB2WWNhlMphWu14

On the OpenGraphs front, I have been busy making a few optimizations to the render, but mostly focusing on the marketing site and building some tools, and browser extensions (!) to launch before the full offering is available. And, a side note, the current state of browser extension development somehow feels even more fragmented and disjointed than ever, but I’ll save my thoughts and issues there for another episode.

The goal this week is to get the browser extension submitted to at least one of the stores/directories this week, along with updates to the OpenGraphs marketing site to support it/them. And, get one—maybe two!—tools deployed to the site as well. My thinking is that if I can start to bake in some early tools that are nice and people like to use, hopefully that will keep people coming back, subscribing to the newsletter, and aware as new stuff keeps rolling out to the site, leading up to the full-on service becoming available. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes as things progress.

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

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