software

Most of these projects started out as me trying to help fellow journalists save their work. I won't go on too much here about why this is important to me (I've written about it here), but here's my general stance on intellectual property that informs every app on this page:

1. I believe journalists/artists/writers should be able to own a personal copy of their own work;
2. They should be able to transform or otherwise alter said work;
3. Being the original creators of this work, they should not have to pay for this privilege.

There are some services/apps that kiiiinda help journalists archive, share, or run analysis on their work, but they're either expensive, don't actually do what we need, or some combo of the above.

So, I started (using AI and) teaching myself how to write software to do this.

Again, this is all pretty niche, but if it's helpful for you, awesome! Let me know how you use it.

VICE Site Scraper

Copy-paste your author URL, and you'll get every article you ever wrote. Mac-only.

Incredibly niche (it only works for one site), but getting a couple hundred articles in one go without getting 429'd is nice.

Grab it here.

YouTube DownLoader+Analysis (for journalists)

Yet another niche tool for journalists. If you just want to download YouTube videos, there is easier software out there (this one is nice).

So, why use this? This setup has a couple of extra features for journalists who need specific metrics data for their portfolio: it adds the upload date and the viewcount into the file name. See the above image for an example.

If you'd like to use it, there are two options:

1. The new version: just download the ytdl+a file below. When it opens, it basically builds the software environment on your computer automatically for you. It also creates a spreadsheet with data on all of your videos, including comment count, views, etc; to allow you to sort or do whatever. It also gets all the comments. Have fun with the data!

2. Or if you really want to get your hands dirty, you can get the old version. This is more of a tutorial than 'software' proper, but if you're curious about how the new version works, this one walks you through everything. You can access it here.

Mac Frontend: Twitch Stream + Chat Downloader

Ever wanted to save your favorite Twitch streams for later?

Or, are you a Twitch streamer who wants to take your social clips to the next level by making them more dynamic? Or do you want to do some sort of analysis on Twitch chat logs from your stream, or someone else’s?

And ...are you using a Mac or Linux, so you can't use the (very good) Windows-only frontend? Then this tool might be for you.

[chrome extension] the un-transcender

A browser extension that went a tiny bit viral. You can read about it in Splinter here:

This Chrome extension replaces ‘transcended race’ with ‘was retroactively deemed safe by white people’

When beloved celebrities of color die, there’s a particular way that the media likes to remember them that lauds the deceased’s legacy of somehow having “transcended” their race.

SplinterThe A.V. Club

I wrote this as a joke, mostly. The extension is now deprecated and probably won't be updated (install at your own risk), but if you'd like to look at the code anyway, it's here.