Nat TaylorBlog, Product Management & Tinkering

Labs


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Labs is where I prototype and Projects is where I catalog Labs and Projects that are intended to be public.

Open Source Projects

Code that has graduated from prototypes into full blown projects.

Labs

Labs can be anything, but the lab is the intended home for prototypes and proof-of-concepts.

Hacks, Scripts & One-offs

Little stuff documented via blog posts.

Announcing: Weather – My Web App to Display NWS Data

I made my personal weather (web) app available publicly at: https://apps.nattaylor.com/weather/ It’s designed to be simple, fast and comprehensive (for my use case of daily weather and for local sailing conditions in Marblehead/Boston in the summer.) Please note, it is currently hardcoded to Boston, MA! Building it has been a fun project. It started with […]

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Letter Writing Campaigns with Email Links

mailto links that include subject, body and CCs (e.g. <a href=”mailto:name@domain.com?&subject=HelloWorld&body=Hi”>send email</a>) turn out to be a great way to streamline the process of writing to elected officials, like this: Create a landing page with information about the issue Add mailto links that have include the subject, body and CC Distribute the landing page link […]

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Bookmarklet: Edit Current WordPress Page

I manage several WordPress sites that I’m frequently not logged into. Often someone will send me a link to a page with a typo, or something, and I find its a bit of a chore to 1) login 2) click Pages 3) find the page 4) click edit so I made the following bookmarklet that […]

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Analyze Boston SQL Client 1.0 Release

I am proud to announce the 1.0 release of the unofficial browser-based SQL Client for Analyze Boston at https://nattaylor.com/labs/analyzeboston Version 1.0 now offers a very approachable UX. This screencast offers a walkthrough of the new features https://youtu.be/eKUrV0yQCW4 Notable New Features include: Help screen is now much more detailed including an overview view. Query Worksheet supports multiple queries and […]

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Analyze Boston SQL Client Beta Release

I am proud to announce the beta release of the unofficial browser-based SQL Client for Analyze Boston at https://nattaylor.com/labs/analyzeboston The client provides a browser-based interface for executing and display the results of SQL queries against Analyze Boston’s open data portal datasets. Features The client is designed to stay lite, offering just: SQL editor with syntax highlighting […]

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Customizing Website Subscription Emails

Swappa.com allows users to subscribe to listings via email, but the messages only contain a link and omit useful information like the price. I wanted to use the email notifications to generate better email notifications, and cooked up the following: Forward the email to a separate dedicated email account Apply a filter to the messages […]

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Shutterfly Story Export

Shutterfly has a neat feature called “Stories” that have a cool UI, but no easy way to export.  I wanted to store the photos in Google Photos, so here is the process I came up with. It starts with a Shutterfly story URL like: https://photos.shutterfly.com/story/id/120075324736 Replace <STORY_ID> in the cURL command below, and find the payload.message property. […]

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Wedding Name Cards

One task for our wedding was printing cards with names, table number and entreé choice. Microsoft Word would be great for the mail merge, but not the aesthetics; Adobe Illustrator would be great for the design, but I’m unfamiliar with it’s “variable data importer.” I wondered: “Can the browser do this?” and before long, with […]

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Making PDF Newsletters Accessible

As the Rhodes 19 Fleet 5 webmaster, I was faced with doing something with over a decade of PDF newsletters. I decided the best thing to do was to extract and structure the content, then put it into WordPress so that I was easy to find, access, archive and index. The newsletters were produced in […]

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Sugarbush Weather

I love skiing at Sugarbush (the best mountain in the East,) so I threw together this weather dashboard.  Features include: Live, animated precipitation map from accuweather.com National Weather Service forecast for Warren, VT Sugarbush snow report NWS Summit report Latest post from the Mad River Blog Live mountain stats from Sugarbush.com Let me know what […]

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