Monthly Archives: September 2016

Enable AMP Analytics using a custom WordPress plugin

I’ve recently enabled support for Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, and Apple News on this blog following this enlightening article.

It wasn’t exactly plain sailing; AMP needs a logo, and a featured image set for every article (both of which must be above a minimum size); the Instant Articles plugin has a feed url which my feedburner plugin breaks; Apple News needs some real tweaking, but still strips out code blocks from posts.

However, I also wanted to get my AMP plugin hooked up with my Google Analytics tracking. Luckily, the plugin from Automattic has support for this, but I needed to implement the analytics configuration using a custom theme or a custom plugin.

I’m not a PHP developer, let alone a WordPress developer, so this doesn’t come naturally to me! Please bear with me..

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Create your first QnA bot using botframework’s QnA Maker

When talking about the botframework, and chatbots in general, people usually assume that these are all using some clever logic and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to deliver a chunk of business logic via a natural language interface.

With the botframework this is most likely implemented by wiring up the Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS): originally a stand-alone, (optionally) self-training, natural language understanding service, but now part of Microsoft Research’s Cognitive Services – previously “Project Oxford” – a collection of extremely powerful machine learning APIs for processing images, video, text, speech, to extract meaning.

Exceptionally powerful, incredibly clever stuff.

Almost all botframework articles and tutorials you’ll see at the moment will either do very basic pattern matching to extract intent from a message, or they’ll use LUIS (or a combination of the two); how to use LUIS is the subject of another article entirely, since this is no small task (I’ll come back to this in another article).

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Debugging BotFramework locally using ngrok

No doubt you’re already having lovely long conversations with your bot via Skype (or Facebook Messenger, or even SMS!) built using the botframework, and by using the Bot Emulator you can run your bot locally and debug it.

However, once it’s deployed and is being called via the Bot Connector framework, instead of directly, things get a bit tougher.

If you haven’t managed to override the – rather nasty – default exception handling that swallows exceptions and spews out reams of useless stack trace, then you may not have much idea what’s going on with your deployed bot, since all you get back is “Sorry, my bot code is having a problem.”

When you encounter a strange problem whilst conversing with your bot in Skype, going through the process of adding loads of logging and redeploying, trying again, checking logs – just to see the journey your bot code is going through – isn’t the most efficient.

If only you could debug the code on your development PC just as easily as you could before the bot was deployed, locally in Visual Studio…

In this article I’m going to show you how to debug your bot code from Skype though to your local PC’s Visual Studio instance, thanks to the amazing ngrok!

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Summing CSV data with Powershell

As I’ve mentioned previously, I tend to use Powershell for all manner of random things. This time around I wanted to use it to avoid having to upload a csv to google drive or opening up my other laptop that has Excel on it, just to get some numbers.

I’m self-employed, so I have to regularly do my personal tax return. My – extremely inefficient – process involves leaving it until the last minute, then trawling through my online bank account and downloading each month’s statement in csv format and digging through these to find the numbers I need to fill out the various documents.

Naturally, I’d prefer to do this automatically, ideally scripted. So I did!

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