____  _  _  ____
(_  _)/ )( \(  __)
  )(  ) __ ( ) _)
 (__) \_)(_/(____)
 ____   __   __  __    _  _
(    \ / _\ (  )(  )  ( \/ )
 ) D (/    \ )( / (_/\ )  /
(____/\_/\_/(__)\____/(__/
  __  __ _  ____  ____  ____  ____   __    ___   __  ____  __  __   __ _
 (  )(  ( \(_  _)(  __)(  _ \(  _ \ /  \  / __) / _\(_  _)(  )/  \ (  ( \
  )( /    /  )(   ) _)  )   / )   /(  O )( (_ \/    \ )(   )((  O )/    /
 (__)\_)__) (__) (____)(__\_)(__\_) \__/  \___/\_/\_/(__) (__)\__/ \_)__)

It's not as bad as it sounds.

Challenge

It takes more than 1 minute to write a blog post (not to mention that introverts need to prepare their brain to spaz out with the extros running around everywhere).

Solution

You receive a phone call. A friendly robot asks you an open ended question:

• What's been on your mind today?
• What did you dream about?
• Describe the mood in your city lately.
• etc

Your 1 minute answer is transcribed and published to your blog.

Application structure

Actors:

• The interstitial Sinatra app hosted on Heroku in my case (app)
• Jekyll blog hosted on github pages (blog)
• Twilio (twilio)

Under the hood:

• The app wakes up and tells twilio to call you with a question.
• Twilio records the answer and hits the callback endpoint on the app
• The app grabs the recording and transcript of the call from twilio
• The app creates a jekyll-formatted post and commits it to the blog repo
• The app deploys the blog changes to github pages and "hello world"

Please feel free to run with the project on github. Contributions welcome.

To be done

• Integrate with github api to automatically publish posts to Jekyll
• Integrate with Mechanical Turk to get better transcriptions.