Tag: tools

New Tool Release: Bluesky Live

Bluesky Logo

Somewhat recently Bluesky added the ability to mark/set yourself as Live on Bluesky and link out from Bluesky to a given service. At the moment that is a short list of services, but includes Twitch and Stream.place among others.

If you were to set yourself as Live manually on Bluesky, you are maxed to 4 hours, so you would need to remember and come back to bump your time or manually remove the status if you ended before 4 hours.

Given Bluesky oAuth is a thing, and because App Passwords are not tooooo much fun with work with IMO, so I built a tool to implement Bluesky oAuth as an adventure in how Bluesky does oAuth (thats likely gonna be a separate post as it’s pretty interesting and in depth).

I’m still tweaking/optimising how my code runs as there are some caching layers that could be added to speed up operations, but I digress!

AND SO via the powers of Twitch oAuth and Twitch eventsub, pair the two services together to do Bluesky Live AUTOMATICALLY! (Anyone using Stream.place it’s native to the platform)

MAGIC!

The only drawback is that Bluesky oAuth is a smidge brittle, as outlined in this Issue on GitHub I authored, even when you have your Client configured as confidential. And understanding how scopes work is FUN! (Follow up post soon)

Well what does it do?

First of all it handles the 4 hour max issue, by “bumping” the expiration time automatically whilst the Twitch channel is live. As well as:

When you go live on Twitch

  • Mark your Bluesky as live with a link to your Twitch
  • Applies your stream title as the title as Bluesky live entry
  • Applies your stream thumbnail to the Bluesky live entry

When you change your Title or Category

  • Applies your new stream title as the title as Bluesky live entry
  • Applies your new stream thumbnail to the Bluesky live entry

When you go offline on Twitch

  • Delete the live status

Periodically/every 15 minutes

  • Updates the thumbnail from Twitch to Bluesky
  • Updates the title from Twitch to Bluesky
  • Rebump the expire timer
  • Sanity check and remove the status

But wait, there’s more

Yes there is MORE!

Kylo Ren yelling MORE on loop
MORE!

Since this tool pairs your Twitch account with a Bluesky Account, when the job runs to maintain Bluesky live status, it can see if you are live elsewhere (manually set or auto set by another service), if that elsewhere is not Twitch then I won’t overwrite or attempt to manage it.

But, if it IS Twitch, then I’ll maintain the live status (and the thumbnail), so if you manually marked yourself as live on another channel, the tool will maintain the thumbnail and expire timer till that channel goes offline (or you manually remove it) which is great if you are guesting on another stream, or doing a Dungeons and Dragons show for example elsewhere on Twitch when it’s not dual streamed to your own channel.

Why 4 Hours

No idea, but on the upside it does mean that if the oAuth breaks due to the brittleness or other reasons, and the tool cannot write to your Bluesky account any more, the status will self disappear on its own.

Then you just need to reauthenticate to the tool and away it goes

Ok, let me use it

You can find the tool over at https://bluesky.chatbot.barrycarlyon.co.uk/ and it comes with the bonus of listing who is live using the tool! FREE DISCOVERY!

Starship Discovery care of https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery

And yes it works with custom Bluesky handles, like mine barrycarlyon.co.uk and should work with ANY PDS (personal data server).

Support can be found via my Discord, check the site for the invite link down the bottom right, and/or support the tool via my ko-fi! Or drop me a line thru the usual channels.

Free support methods? Well retweet/repost the Twitter or Bluesky posts about it! (or the ones about this blog post that I don’t have the links to yet!)

A screenshot of the Tool showing a handful of live streamers on Twitch whom are using the tool.

The Twitch Extensions Developer Rig is Dead

Or is it?

Preamble

Twitch decided to deprecate the Extension Developer Rig, which is fine, just about everything that the rig could do is avialable via the API now. You can read about the Deprecation on the Developer Forums.

The final thing that was API enabled was bits product management, which for a while was rig only, but is now available in the API and more recently in the developer console, so if you don’t want to write or use a tool, you can use the developer console instead.

You can read more about the Bits product management announcement over on the Twitch Developer Forums.

So What Now?

For those working with Twitch Extensions, you can either write you own tools to talk to various things via the API, such as the Config service or Bits product management or you can use a tool that someone else wrote such as my own Twitch Extension Tools. But that leaves out the one thing that the Rig can do but nothing else can, which is view testing.

View Testing

The optimal way, in my opinion, to do view testing is to get your Testing Base URI setup over SSL, either via using a real URL, or a reverse proxy tool such as NGROK.

But there are times where you don’t want to do that or just want to quickly test a video or component slot extension without going live, which is where the Rig comes in, you can test those sort of extensions without going live, or even by putting the “wrong” channel behind you extension (listen to Monstercat whilst working on your extension for example….)

The rig is still available for doing that sort of testing, but you may need to reimport/reopen a project or refresh the projects manifest into the rig, or you have started a new Extension and need to test.

That part of the rig is broken, you’ll hit the buttons and nothing will work as the API’s the Rig are trying to talk to just no longer work if they exist at all, to that end I devised a little tool to cover.

The Manifester

Presenting the Twitch DeveloperRig Manifester (not affiliated with Twitch naturally).

A Screenshot of the Manifester. It’s ok the userID is mine I can leak my ID all I want mom!

Which provides the following tools:

  • Import a Project, generate a new project file from an Extension and add it to the Developer Rig
  • Refresh Manifest, update an existing project file or change the active version,
  • Reopen Project, when you import an extension into the rig it generates a project file saving with it the views you made, you can then close the project in the rig, this file tool lets you reopen that project file and add it back to the rig.

Thats the three main things “broken” in the rig that can be replaced.

The other thing missing is “create a new extension and add it to the rig”, for that you need to use the developer console and then import to the rig via the Manifester.

Just remember to close the developer rig first before trying to use the manifester to do actions.

Notes

It’s a quick and simple Electron app licensed under WTFPL so go wild!

Summary

So, for helping with your Twitch Extension Development either:

  • write you own tools to interact with the API
  • use the Developer Console for bits product management
  • use a tool such my Twitch Extension Tools to talk to the various Extension related APIs
  • the Developer Rig Manifester to continue testing in the rig
  • test your extensions on the Twitch website with the testing base URI behind SSL (and don’t forget to have it in a subfolder to model hosted test and above best)
  • or any combination of the above