A single place to dump my ideas. It is a repository of ideas in the public domain, that anyone can use and implement. I’m also going to use this document to think and ponder about the ideas, to stop myself from diving straight in and building something out…
If there are similar or existing projects related to the ideas listed here, feel free to send a PR with a link to the project.
This repository is inspired by captn3m0’s ideas repository.
- WhatsApp thread reader
- Substack/Newsletter to PDF/eBook
- Audio Indexer and Store
- ✔️ GitHub Action to announce new posts
- Ultimate Frisbee Statistics and Highlight Reels using play-by-play commentary
WhatsApp is one of the most widely used chat services, yet sorely missing some features that would make it much easier to work with.
Zulip like topics could make it easier to follow some groups where I don’t want to actively participate, but only want to catch-up on some interesting discussions.
The lowest hanging fruit woudl be to be able to use the “reply to” option and create something like a forum thread with multiple levels of heirarchy. A stretch goal would be to be able to mark even messages that weren’t sent as replies to other messages to be marked as replies, when they are, using some kind of text analysis.
Using some smart topic/title generation to label the thread or topic would also be interesting. Similarly, generating a summary would also be fun. But, sending out all these texts to an external AI model isn’t something that I wouldn’t be comfortable doing. Is there a browser local way to do this? Looks like there’s now an LLM that runs in the browser, now.
It could also be interesting to locally mark some topics/threads as unread or important and to be able to come back to them later.
It could also be interesting to add search features on top of this to allow searching for messages with links, attachments, etc., or links sent by a specific person within a specified time-period, etc.
This could be built as a browser extension that works on top of the WhatsApp Web UI. It is possible to access the locally stored data from the IndexedDB.
Allowing users to export a specific topic/thread or a date-range of messages would be very useful. Generating a HTML or markdown page could be useful for newsletter authors or bloggers. Downloading media and files for a specific duration or sent by a specific user would be useful too. I’ve built some of this “export/share/download” functionality as a PWA that uses a WhatsApp chat export file. But, the exported chat file doesn’t have enough metadata to create the thread reader discussed here.
Lot of people use Substack to write stuff, these days. It would be nice to be able to archive these posts, for future, since these things could disappar. Or having them as a PDF/eBook is sometimes handy.
If it was a simple site, using a web archival tool like wget mirror would’ve
been enough, but Substack’s UI is only JS friendly. We’ll need a browser like
tool to be able to download and archive all the posts. It would be useful to
specify a time duration or a topic filter for posts. (Not sure if Substack
newsletters have tags of any kind).
It could be easier to build a tool for the writers using the export functionality of Substack, but it might be more generally useful to build this tool using the published data of a substack.
Supporting gifs would be great! PDFs don’t really support GIFs, do they?
A wrapper on top of something like percollate would be good enough?
For photos and videos, I take the lazy route and let Google store them for me. Google arranges them nicely (after running their algos on my data 🤷), and lets me search by person, by place, etc.
I’d like to have a similar indexer and storage for my audio files. There are some note taking apps (like Google Keep) that let you take audio notes and arrange them in a searchable fashion. But, I’d also like something for audio files shared with me like song covers recorded and shared by friends, jam sessions, etc. or voice notes sent by friends and family.
It’d be nice to have something self hosted. It’d be fun to play with the bleeding edge in this field to see what’s out there, and how easy or difficult it is to setup something that works.
Zapier, IFTTT, etc let users announce new posts on Twitter, etc. But, they are based on RSS feeds. This makes them not as configurable as they could be – for instance, adding hashtags isn’t very easy.
It should be possible to write a GitHub action that extracts the required fields from a static site’s content repo, and creates a new tweet/update that can be posted to social media using existing GitHub actions.
UPDATE: Created a GitHub Action using GPT-4.
Using YouTube captions of play-by-play commentary, would it be possible to generate statistics for a game? Would it be possible to also find highlights of a particular player or of the game, and generate a highlight reel?
Maybe a quick thing to try with something like Fixie.ai or using ChatGPT to write the code as well.