Excited to share this side project with Product Hunt! A couple months ago, it felt like an utter deluge of political news was happening every day. When I found WTF Just Happened Today?" in its email digest form, I loved the funny/irreverent tone Matt takes, and how much care he takes to be unbiased in his summaries.
I also wanted to learn how to write an Alexa skill for my Echo, so I found a mutual friend (hi @sandimac!) to reach out through and get his blessing. The coding part was really cool to play with (AWS Lambda + Node.js) and SUPER easy. Like 4 hours easy. The approvals process was extremely cumbersome (I don't think they were SUPER stoked to have a skill that gets as close to the line of their Terms of Service with cursing as we do) but a couple months later, we're so excited to see what people think!
If anyone's curious about making an Alexa skill, I'll be around all day to chat. Same with Matt on his experience growing his community.
@staringispolite That's right! Big ups to @sandimac (whom I've never met in person, but feel like I've known for years from using Quibb!) for connecting us! 🤗
👋 Hey PH!
This is Matt, creator of WTF Just Happened Today, a newsletter logging the daily shock and awe in national politics.
I'm super excited about this WTFJHT Alexa skill – not because it's awesome! But because it was contributed by @staringispolite, a community member that volunteered his time to make this! So rad. 👊
Simply ask "Alexa, W.T.F. just happened," and she'll give you the latest US news!
Let us know what you think! Here to answer questions!
https://whatthefuckjusthappenedt...
Source code for WTFJHT: https://github.com/mkiser/WTFJHT
Source code for WTFJHT Skill: https://github.com/staringispoli...
@alwaysunday@staringispolite Hey Andy, unfortunately no. Amazon has some, uh, sensitivities to the F-bomb. We also discovered that "What" is a reserved invocation utterance for Alexa (at least that's our suspicion).
@alwaysunday It's W.T.F. the letters :) In theory, Amazon's terms allow for having people say the actual words, but in practice we couldn't get it approved that way, no matter how much we censored the app/collateral/etc.
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@matt_kiser@staringispolite Matt you are KILLING it. Love that WTFJHT has taken off like crazy (despite your already crazy life). Will be installing on my echo ASAP
This is awesome @staringispolite and @matt_kiser! Any plans to release integrations for other platforms? Would love it on Google Home/Now! #TypicalWantAndroidVersion
@matt_kiser@staringispolite the hashtag is key. Glad I could inspire you. 😂 Been using API.AI to create personal bots, and you can deploy to Google Home pretty easily from there. I currently don't have a Google Home, but I'll get one to use WTFJHT when you launch!
@matt_kiser Something I'm curious about, that we haven't talked about - how has the experience been as a side project maker, once you shifted from growing an email newsletter, to taking on collaborators like me?
@staringispolite Good question! The WTFJHT project started on a whim and became popular very quickly. I can't say I had a plan or was prepared – it's not like I had some policy or process in place for working with folks.
A lot of people reached out about contributing code, copy, and other skills, which was amazing and inspiring. It was also a little overwhelming! I've been juggling a full time job, running the site (which has become it's own type of full time job), and, you know, trying to also maintain a normal social life.
What's amazing, though, is that everybody has volunteered their time. The WTFJHT community is so cool! From you proactively reaching out wanting to build this, to several devs teaching me how to setup continuous integration, SSL, a CDN, migrate to S3, to a few guys testing out a podcast (we eventually killed this but will probably bring it back), and more. There's an entire group of copyeditors that make pull requests to fix typos for me! Amazing.
These are all things I couldn't have done myself and this strength in numbers community is what makes WTFJHT so special. :)
@dredurr From a technical standpoint, it's so easy once you get your head around AWS Lambda. What worked for me was just following one of the "random fact skill" tutorials and subbing out my own code. Got the prototype for WTFJHT done in one night
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Is it not available in the UK store? Can't seem to find it :(
@matt_kiser@fabienb That's strange. I just double checked the country setting, and on our end, we have "In all countries and regions where Amazon distributes skills" selected.
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@staringispolite@matt_kiser This is what I tried:
1. clicked on the Get It button above, that took me to amazon.com (US),
2. I copied the name of the skill and clicked on the link in the Amazon page that said "it seems you are registered in UK, click here to go to the skills page in UK" (or something like that)
3. In the UK skills home, I pasted the skill name in the search bar
4. This was the result: Your search "WTF Just Happened Today" did not match any products.
Even if I try to simply search for WTF, Amazon say: We didn't find results for "wtf" in Alexa Skills. Could it be that the keyword is banned? Has anyone else in UK been able to enable this skill?
Cheers!
@fabienb@matt_kiser Closing the loop on this - Amazon's developer console has a place to choose where the skill should be available: "In all countries and regions where Amazon distributes skills" or "selected countries or regions".
We have "all countries and regions" selected, but that's essentially a lie. It looks like, even though the speech is already defined in English, we would have had to create an English "translation" for each additional English-speaking country we wanted it to be published for.
Chalk this up to a still-maturing app store, I suppose. But it sounds like they're fixing it - I got an automated email saying the skill should go live in the UK automatically on May 23rd.
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