I finally added a /now page to this site. It is pretty basic right now but I hope to add more content to it soon.
Currently it contains my recent watching and listening info. The movies use my Letterboxd watch diary; the TV shows come from a Notion page; and the music comes from the Last.fm API.
The last.fm API is quite annoying because it doesn’t return artist images, so I had to use the Spotify API for those instead.
I have been tweaking the styles on the site. I reduced the crop on the big “ZANDER” at the top and bottom of the site. Previously it was set dead-centre, but I found that reducing the crop (so more of the word is shown) looked a lot better.
I built a Raycast extension for Otter a long time ago. It allows you to search and view recent bookmarks. It is a great companion to Otter. I have just submitted a new version to the Raycast extension store so it should be released soon for everyone to use.
The PR for the extension is here: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/pull/11066
After the craziness where a Netlify customer was charged $104K because of a DDoS attack, I decided to move my personal site and as many web things to Cloudflare. Most of my sites are on Vercel and I have a few on Netlify and while I love their services, I don’t want to take any chances.
Bookmark feed items in Otter already show the tags associated with that item, but now I added matching collections to them as well.
When adding or editing a bookmark, Otter checks the contents of the title, description and note fields to see if they match existing tags. If a match is found, it is shown below the tag input field. Since the addition of collections recently, the tag matching logic needed improveing because it would only match tags exactly, for example if the tag was web:dev and the user typed dev, it wouldn’t match. In this update I improved the matching logic to match tags that contain the user input. For example, if the user types dev, it will match web:dev and dev:ops.
Various other UI improvements were made to the app to make it better on mobile devices.
I updated Otter’s PostgreSQL database to version 15 through the Supabase dashboard. There was an issue with the database migration, I wasn’t able to add new items anymore. I was getting this error: permission denied for table http_request_queue.
After a bit of searching, I found out that the pg_net extension was the cause of the issue. To fix I had to disable it then re-enable it in the “Database extensions” section of the Supabase dashboard.
Added collections to Otter. Collections are not another entity like tags, but are created implicitly when you use a tag with a colon in, for example with the ai:openai or ai:anthropic tags the collection would be ai for both items. I use this form or grouping throughout Otter and I always wanted a simple way for collections to be displayed in the app, and now that they’re here, I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner!
I also added a tag management page so users can rename tags. It has helped me group more tags together into collections, and I’m sure it will help others too.
This work contributed to the v2.4.1 release.
I finally added Opengraph images to this site today. I used the @vercel/og package so I could automate the process as much as possible.
Here’s an example image:
The source code for the image can be found here
One of the AI features the Arc browser recently introduced renames tabs and downloaded files. It is a really small and simple thing but it made me think that Otter could use something similar. When adding new bookmarks, the titles often use very different formatting from one site to the next. This makes it hard to scan the list of bookmarks and find the one you are looking for. It would be nice if Otter could automatically rename the bookmarks to something more consistent.
I also improved the Toast component. I opted to replace the existing Toast component with a new one that is more easy to use called Sonner.
This work contributed to the v2.3.1 Otter release
I added a worklog to my site. I’ve seen a few other folks doing this, and I think it’s a great idea. I’m going to try and keep it up to date with what I’m working on, and what I’ve been up to.
I spent a large chunk of the day trying to integrate Raycast’s OAuth flow into 
Otter. I got it working, but unfortunately Supabase only supports the managment APIs using OAuth apps, not the data APIs. I’m going to have to use a different approach.
I have the WIP code in two PRs:
This release added a new dashboard view to Otter that shows a some recent items and others from your past. It is intended to allow more frequent review of your past items so they are not lost in the stream. Below is a video of the new dashboard in action.
This release is the culmination of weeks worth of work to completely rewrite Otter . More info about this new version can be found in the announcement blog post.
Published a blog post about my approach to styling React components and apps. Read it here.
I finished the Mastodon to Supabase Cloudflare worker. This is used to saved my toots and faved toots to Otter’s database.
The repo for it is here: github.com/mrmartineau/mastodon-to-supabase
I finished creating the page metadata scraper that’s built with Cloudflare Workers. It uses HTMLRewriter to parse the page and extract content. It will be integrated into Otter soon.
The repo for it is here: github.com/mrmartineau/cloudflare-worker-scraper
