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Running NodeJS Serverless Locally

 So it's been a long time, but I thought this was a neat little trick so I thought I'd share it with the world - as little followers as I have.  In my spare time I've been writing up a new hobby project in Serverless , and while I do maintain a staging and production environment in AWS, it means I need to do a deployment every time I want to test all of the API's I've drafted for it. Not wanting to disturb the yaml configuration for running it locally, I've come up with a simple outline of a server which continues to use the same configuration.  Take the express driven server I first define here: And then put a index.js  in your routes folder to contain this code: Voila! This will take the request from your localhost and interpret the path against your serverless.yml and run the configured function.  Hope this helps someone!
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Google Sheets Web App

 Greetings! Has been yet another long period since my last post, but hopefully the type of content makes up for it.  Today I'm writing about a need that I had to document my entire movie collection in Google Sheets, because some that were on my local network, some on DVD, some on my Playstation Video account and as well as my small collection in Google TV.  All in all there is currently over 500 movies, and growing. So the spreadsheet is fine on its own, but something nice and "pretty" was needed to list, search and filter by the movie's attributes.  I first got an API key to be used with  OMDB API .  This allows me to get a JSON of the movie's IMDB attributes with a search from the title.  I then added two functions in the "Apps Script" component of the sheet: From here, I could call the function to search (from a cell) with: =API(CONCAT("http://www.omdbapi.com/?apikey=*******&t=",ENCODEURL(A1))) That would return the JSON (assuming A1 is

Auth0 - Removing Social Accounts

Greetings!  Long time it has been.  Today's post comes from a project I was handed to convert the tens of thousands of users through our website that are using social accounts into email/password logins.  It has served us well over the years, but with the on-going scrutiny from the changes at Facebook, and the integration we need to do with our online shop which does not have social authentication - makes sense it is time to remove. But what is the cleanest way? We want to make this as seamless and easy as possible for our customers and with one EDM delivery.  I have come up with the following procedure: The comments should make it fairly self-explanatory.  What you may find interesting is that we are deleting the corresponding user from Wordpress .  This will get re-created after they sign in with the new user ID.  If you are curious on the SQL that can be used to look up and delete the user by the Auth0 user_id, you can use this query: From there you can delete the user ID from t

question2answer Wordpress Integration

 Today I want to journal my implementation of a WordPress site with the package of "question2answer".  It comes as self-promoted as being able to integrate with WordPress "out of the box".  I'm going to vent a small amount of frustration here, because the only integration going on is the simplicity of configuration with using the same database, along with the user authentication of WordPress.  Otherwise they run as two separate sites/themes. This will not do. So let's get to some context.  I have a new hobby project in mind which requires a open source stack-overflow clone.  Enter question2answer .  Now I don't want to come across as completely ungrateful, this package - while old, ticks all the boxes and looks like it was well maintained, but I need every  page to look the same to have a seamless integration.  So, let's go through this step by step. Forum Index Update This step probably  doesn't need to be done, but I just wanted to make sure th

Google Service Migration

I recently published an entry where I had gotten back in to understanding how awesome the Google Script was.  I was doing a routine check to see if the script was running in good health and as it turns out, I discovered that the methods used in the ContactsApp were being deprecated - advising to switch to the People API . So, this is just a short journal entry to say I have now updated the repository using this service.  Works much the same, just links the contact to the group slightly differently.  Comments and suggestions always welcome!

Getting all deltas from Auth0

Before I get in to the solution of this article, let me tell you how it started and fill you in on the problem that arose.  I wrote a procedure to get daily deltas of users - those of which who had created/updated their account on the given day (and including the day before for good measure on the GMT timestamp).  The simple search criteria was just the following: updated_at:[yyyy-mm-dd TO yyyy-mm-dd] Simple, right?  the []'s being the dates are inclusive, while using {} would mean exclusively.  Auth0 lets you mix these on either side depending on your use.  While this is all well and good, Auth0 will limit the number of results (even with paging) to 1000 only. So, your first option is that you could have your procedure create a user export job, and then parsing through the results and eliminating those which do not meet your updated_at search criteria.  I can tell you first hand that eventually the amount of users will just get to be too much and cumbersome to process through

The power of Google Script

I'm pretty excited to share today's post, because I have found inspiration on something I've wanted to do for quite a while.  I'm one of those users whose life is completely on Google.  A few years ago I had emptied my filing cabinet, scanned everything in and put them to easy to navigate folders in the Google Drive.  This is just amazing because I continue to photograph and scan everything including receipts - and if I need to return a product, I scan the barcode and the drive's image recognition can find it within either PDF's or images -- bang! And then there is Google Photos, where I have tagged almost everyone I have ever known, and have migrated all of my albums to one easy to search location.  Finally after a few hours procrastinating, I even put a label next to each and every one of my contacts, and now never miss a beat. But then there are my emails; while everything was up to date and marked as read, my labeling history here is less than to be desired