Category: Programming

Side Projects: TrumpNewsDB.com, and PresidentTweety.app

I created a couple of web apps to analyze Donald Trump, and learn more about Azure services. While they are not complete, the election is looming, and I want to share them with anyone interested in using them.

TrumpNewsDB

TrumpNewsDB is a searchable/filterable database of Trump related news, and summaries over the last 4 years. A few different lists of link collections were pulled in and had dates, categories, source information attached. The news articles currently only go through pre-Covid-19, but I have created some Azure Logic Apps / Functions to automatically load new articles / missing articles that I hope to have up, and running this week.

The sheer amount of news articles meant I needed some help, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of my wife, and friends combing through articles, dates, and tags.

PresidentTweety

PresidentTweety pulls in tweets by Donald Trump, and analyzes them using Azure Cognitive Text Analytics. It then tweets out the analysis, and a link using the twitter account @PresTweetyApp. It includes small dashboard which shows data from the past 24 hours.

If I’m honest, this one could use a little more time in the oven, but I realized over time that people don’t really care how crazy/disrespectful his tweets are so I lost interest.

Next Steps

These projects were pretty fun to work on, and a great outlet for my extra pent up 2020 energy. I learned a ton about Azure, and feel pretty confident in my ability to use a number of services I had not even heard of 6 months ago. I’m going to continue to work on them as I have time, and hope to create a small write up explaining each in a little more detail.

Please Vote!

Please vote in the upcoming election on November 3. If you need more information about how to vote or methods to vote, check out out vote.org, or iwillvote.com. I’m not an expert ,but if you need more personal help, reach out to me on Twitter (@hailmike) and I’ll do what I can. Do your own research, and make sure the candidates you are voting for will best represent you. Finally, don’t forget the down ballots. Your local representative may seem unimportant, but they have a lot more impact than you think.

Downsides/Gotchas of using Projections in Episerver Find

Episerver Find is my preferred way to write searches for Episerver. It allows me to write search queries quickly using a LINQ like syntax I am familiar with, while leveraging Episerver’s cloud servers to do the heavy lifting.

While this does shift some of our server load to Episerver’s servers, the standard implementation still relies on my servers to load model data, and build view models. Generally this isn’t slow, but processing complex view models can hurt performance, and impact server load, especially as result sets increase in size, and complexity.

Projections allow me to specify which fields Episerver Find should retrieve data for, for a given query. I try to use them wherever it makes sense, since it allows us to display results with very little server load. There are a few downsides/gotchas that I’ve had to work through though.

Continue reading “Downsides/Gotchas of using Projections in Episerver Find”

Debugging Episerver Find Queries

Episerver Find is a powerful search platform for Episerver, but it can be somewhat difficult to debug issues with. There are many posts on Episerver World discussing debugging with Fiddler, but none that describe how to configure it. I recently forgot myself and had to look it up again.

Add (or merge) the following to your development web.config:

<system.net>
    <defaultProxy
      enabled = "true"
      useDefaultCredentials = "true">
      <proxy 
        autoDetect="false" 
        bypassonlocal="false" 
        proxyaddress="http://127.0.0.1:8888" 
        usesystemdefault="false" 
      />
    </defaultProxy>
    <settings>
      <servicePointManager
        checkCertificateName="false"
        checkCertificateRevocationList="false"
      />
    </settings>
  </system.net>

Enable Filder to listen on the port, by going to Fidler -> Tools -> Options -> Connections, and setting the port number. Make sure “Act as a system proxy on startup” is checked too.

If Fiddler is having trouble reading HTTPS requests/responses, you may need to reset Fiddler’s HTTPS certificates.

Mexican v1.0

I decided to publish my basic Mexican dice application for Android smart phones and tablets. It’s a very simple game and there isn’t much functionality in it yet. It allows you to roll, hide/show, show odds of being beaten/tied and counts the number of rolls. I plan to add some sort of look back function to see if any one was lying, but haven’t decided how I want to do so. I also plan to add a menu option to disable sounds.

Market link: Mexican

Update! I have since lost the key and will have to make a new app to incorporate all of the bug fixes and new enhancements :(.