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Playing around with Yo

01 Aug, 2014
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Yo has been quite a bit in the news lately. Mainly because it got a lot of investment, which surprised and shocked some people because it all seems too simple. Yo only allows you to send a Yo notification to other users. However, it has a lot of potential to become big while staying that simple.
Screenshot 2014-08-01 14.23.48
After reading Why A Stupid App Like Yo May Have Billion-Dollar Platform Potential a few days ago I felt it was time to play around a bit with Yo and it’s API.

I came up with 3 very simple use cases that should be simple to solve with Yo:

  • Get a Yo when it’s time to have lunch when I’m at work
  • Get a Yo when I forgot to check out from my parking App
  • Get a Yo when a new blog post is published here on the Xebia Blog

Time to register a couple of Yo developer usernames. The Yo API is, just like Yo itself, very simple. You register a username from which you want to receive notifications at https://yoapi.justyo.co after which you’ll receive an API token for that username. Once you have that, people can subscribe to that username with the Yo app. Then you can send a Yo to either all subscribers or to a single subscribe with a simple POST request and the token. All this is explained at https://medium.com/@YoAppStatus/e7f2f0ec5c3c in more detail.
Let’s start with our lunch notifications. I created the TIME2LUNCH username for this. I want my notifications at 12:00pm, since that’s the time I go to lunch. So all I need is some service that sends the POST request every day at 12:00pm (for now I don’t care about getting one in the weekend as well and I only care about my own time zone, Central European Time). Using NodeJS, it’s just a single line of code to do such a request:
[javascript]
require(‘request’)
.post(‘https://api.justyo.co/yoall/‘,
{
form: {api_token: ‘my_secret_api_token’}
}
);
[/javascript]
Now we need to have a scheduler that executes it every day at 12:00pm. Luckily Heroku has a scheduler that can do exactly that:
Screenshot 2014-07-31 17.43.51
So after deploying our javascript file with a single line of code and creating our scheduled job we will receive our daily Yo from TIME2LUNCH. Not bad for a first attempt.
Usually my co-workers will remind me when it’s time to go to lunch so let’s do something that’s actually a bit less useless.
To park my car near the office I always use the Parkmobile service. At the end of the day I have to check out to avoid paying too much. Unfortunately it’s an easy thing to forget. Parkmobile knows this and can send sms alerts at a specific time or after parking a certain amount of hours. Unfortunately they charge € 0.25 per sms. They also send e-mails, but they’re easier to miss. It would be nice to get a Yo instead, for free of course.
What we need is to send the Yo POST request each time we receive the Parkmobile e-mails. Sounds like we might be able to use IFTTT (if this then that) to accomplish this. When browsing for channels and recipes on IFTTT I saw that they already support Yo as a channel. I thought I was gonna be done fast. Unfortunately it’s only possible to use Yo as a trigger (if Yo then that) and not as an action (if this then Yo). So we need another solution here. I couldn’t find a way to send a cURL request directly from IFTTT, but when Googling for a solution I found a webhook project: https://github.com/captn3m0/ifttt-webhook. The ifttt-webhook works by acting as a WordPress site, which is something that can act as an action of IFTTT. It then allows us to send a POST request to a specific URL. Not exactly the POST requests that are accepted by the Yo API though. But we already made some NodeJS code to send a Yo request so I’m sure we can add some code to accept a request from the ifttt-webhook and then pass it on to something that Yo does understand.
If we follow the instructions on the Github page and set our username to our Yo username and use our API token as password, then the webhook will send a POST request with a JSON body that looks something like this:
[javascript]
{ user: ‘MYUSERNAME’, pass: ‘ab1234-1234-abcd-1234-abcd1234abcd’, title: ” }
[/javascript]
We can handle that in NodeJS like this:
[javascript]
var express = require(‘express’);
var bodyParser = require(‘body-parser’)
var app = express();
var request = require(‘request’);
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.post(‘/api/yo’, function (req, res) {
var user = req.body.user;
var apiToken = req.body.pass;
request.post(‘https://api.justyo.co/yo/‘,
{
form: {
api_token: apiToken,
username: user
}
});
});
var port = Number(process.env.PORT || 5000);
app.listen(port, function() {
console.log(‘Listening on ‘ + port);
});
[/javascript]
This is just a simple express web server that listens for POST calls on /api/yo and then uses the user and pass fields from the body to send a POST request to the Yo API.
This is deployed at https://youser.herokuapp.com/ so everyone can use it as a IFTTT to Yo action.
We can now create our IFTTT recipe. Creating the this step is easy. I receive the e-mails from Parkmobile in my Gmail and their e-mail address is norepy@parkmobile.com. So the rule becomes to trigger each time when I receive an email from them. Then in the that step I activate the WordPress channel with the Yo username and api token and in the body I set the https://youser.herokuapp.com/api/yo URL.
Here is the recipe:
Screenshot 2014-07-31 18.32.12
The last use case I had is to send a Yo each time a new blog post was posted on this blog. For that I registered the XEBIABLOG username (so make sure to subscribe to that in your Yo app if you want to get Yo’d as well for each new blog post).
Since this blog has an RSS feed, I figured I could poll that once in a while to check for new posts. We also already used the Heroku scheduler, so we might as well use that again. I found a little node library called feed-read that makes reading RSS feeds easy. So here is our little app that runs every hour:
[javascript]
var feed = require("feed-read");
var request = require(‘request’);
var ONE_HOUR = 60 60 1000;
feed("https://xebia.com/blog/feed/", function(err, articles) {
if (err) throw err;
var lastArticle = articles[0];
if ((new Date() – lastArticle.published) < ONE_HOUR) {
console.log(‘Sending Yo for ‘ + lastArticle.title);
request.post(‘https://api.justyo.co/yoall/‘,
{
form: {
api_token: ‘my_secret_token’
}
});
}
});
[/javascript]
We now have completed our 3 little use cases. Not the most useful things but nice non nonetheless. When looking back on them, we can imagine a couple of improvements. For example for the TIME2LUNCH it would be possible to make a little service where people could register and set their timezone at which they want to receive their notification. We could create a little database that store Yo usernames and the zone. But at this moment it’s not possible to verify that USERX is really USERX. Yo doesn’t support third party authentication like Facebook and Twitter have with OAuth. Perhaps that’s something they will add in the future to make platform more useable for user specific notifications.

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