Opening Demo Accounts for Piweb

Jan. 25, 2021
2 min

Recently, I have spent a lot of time improving Piweb (concatenation of "Raspberry Pi" and "Web application"), my homemade set of web applications. It all began with a simple script, running as a cron task, sending me emails when specific YouTube videos got published. I kept working on it, adding features little by little. After a while, the need for a proper web server framework emerged and I switched to Django. Now, the set of applications includes, besides the landing page and blog app you are currently on, five apps :

FLOnt, a web client for the French Lexicon Ontology, my attempt at casting the French Wiktionary data into an ontology,
Homepy, a bookmark page,
Notifpy, a custom YouTube and Twitch client,
Orgapy, a note management system, with tasks and objectives tracking,
Topopartner, a tool for planning hikes and storing GPX tracks, that combines with the Android app topopartner-android (currently work in progress).

The implemented services are pretty common; the main purpose of those apps is twofold: (i) rid myself of GAFAM ecosystems, thus keeping my data private and (ii) match my tastes in terms of user interface (and also (iii) I like building and coding stuff). The result is surely perfectible but I estimate that it now good enough for allowing other people to interact with it.

So, if you wish to have access to one of the applications listed above, please contact me, describe who you are and what you are planning to do with Piweb and I'll create demo accounts for you.

Unfortunately, I am not authorized to open Notifpy to the public, as it would infringe the YouTube API guidelines. All I can do about that is temporary accounts for one-time demonstrations of its features. But nothing prevents you from installing it on your own Django server!

Also, I unified the front-end libraries used accross my applications, by forking the Spectre.css CSS Framework and adding themes, customizing some rules, adding icons, common JavaScript functions, and more. One may use it by adding the following lines to its HTML <head>:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://chalier.fr/static/piweb/css/master.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://chalier.fr/static/piweb/js/master.js"></script>

I'll write a proper documentation for it once most encountered bugs will be fixed. Meanwhile, you can use the Spectre documentation as a starter, and check for tweaks directly in the code.

That is all for today. If you encounter any bug, please fill in issues on the GitHub repositories of the faulty applications. Thanks for reading!