Here’s another way the creative developer community has cooked up to integrate Slack, the online team collaboration utility: Hook it into Spotify.
Developers at Benchmark rigged up a system whereby you can build custom Slash Commands to augment Slack’s arsenal of built-in slash commands – accessible via the `/` in the message bar.
While Slack’s API hosts a large number of community integrations — including some for Spotify — none exactly fit the profile the Benchmark folks intended. For example, to update the Spotify playlist using a slash command to search for a song, and when found, add it to the playlist.
And from here, we let the experts explain the process:
Using Node.js and taking advantage of the excellent spotify-web-api-node NPM package we were able to get this up and running very quickly … We’ve open sourced the code behind it, so feel free to use and improve the app from it’s very humble beginning.
In addition to the full installation instructions, the Benchmark team recommends hitting “Deploy to Heroku” which “takes advantage of the Heroku platform’s amazingly flexible app-hosting service.”
➤ Slackbox – Spotify playlist collaboration through Slack [Benchmark]
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Forget about getting anything done — ever.
Giphy has released Giphy Tabs for Google Chrome, a new extension that serves up a wacky animation with each new tab.
Giphy Tabs is an evolution of Giphy TV, a continuous feed of the staff’s favorites.
In addition to Giphy TV launching and occupying your entire browser window every time you open a new tab, you can favorite any GIF you see. Just click on the full screen presentation to go directly to the Giphy site. There, you can save favorites and search for more.
➤ Giphy Tabs for Google Chrome
On July 1, Amazon will pay self-published authors based on how many pages have been read in their books.
Amazon is using its Select Global Fund and Kindle’s Lending Library feature to balance payments via this feature. Here’s how Amazon broke it down:
•The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
•The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million multiplied by 20,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
•The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed 100 times but only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
To thwart authors who may want to game the system (or devices that may present info differently), Amazon developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). The system uses line spacing, font size and type, and line height to know how many pages were read based on a standardized format.
If a smartphone showed a book had 200 pages while a tablet displayed a more accurate 150 pages, authors would be credited towards 150 pages read.
Amazon says the change was made in response to authors who “asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read.”
➤ Kindle Unlimited Pages Read [Amazon]