DEV Community: Rita Brown

The best AI tools for running your own blog

Rita Brown — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 19:15:48 +0000

The latest trend in AI tools of different kinds (GPT especially) is all over the internet. I believe that using AI tools wisely can help you improve your blog, grow your audience, and save a lot of time.

Important thing to note! Here, I will refer to the AI tools exclusively as instruments for optimizing your work, not as tools that will generate entire content for you, including full articles. Although such AI tools as ChatGPT can write almost anything you want for you in just a few seconds, I encourage my readers to be creative and write their blog posts by themselves.

AI tools can be useful for blogging in the following ways:

1. As search engines
When we start to write an article or post, we usually start by discovering the topic under consideration. This means that we need to find some resources to dive into the topic and then be able to write about it. The simplest way is to use Google, but there are lots of side sources that may not even be related to the topic you need. That’s where AI can be helpful; you can use a concrete question to narrow your search in just a few seconds!

2. As topic generators
If you are an experienced blogger or just a beginner, you probably face the problem of finding interesting and relevant topics to write about. To do so, you can do a full research: look for trending topics on different platforms like dev.to, geeksforgeeks, hashnode, etc. But it can take a while, and while you are looking, the topic can change. For simplifying the topic generation process, you can use AI, which can help you find the topic you need.

3. Grammar checking and paraphrasing
Everyone makes mistakes. That’s the ground rule for everyone, and that’s okay! When you write an article and have a lot of inspiration, you probably will make some mistakes. But any author wants his work to be a masterpiece; in that case, AI grammar tools are extremely helpful, as are paraphrasing tools. We are not always able to formulate our thoughts in the right way, and this is why such tools are helpful.

And finally, the greatest advantage of using AI tools for blogging is time-saving. This unites all three aforementioned ways. When you run your blog, you (presumably) create your content on a regular basis, and this takes the majority of your time. With the help of AI tools, you can ease your work and save time for more important things (in terms of blogging, obviously), e.g., you can write more posts and articles, create more beautiful pictures for them, or any other additional materials that will make your blog even better!

Below, I listed the AI tools that I find the most helpful:

ChatGPT
I guess it is not a surprise that ChatGPT is the first AI tool on my list. Despite the fact that there were a lot of scandals around this AI and most popular blogging platforms (including dev.to) already implemented special rules for using AI tools in content creation, I still think that if you use it accurately, it is very helpful.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that was trained on an innovative system and is able to maintain a conversation with users. This chatbot is able to generate comprehensive responses on various topics, such as art, technology, politics, religion, nature, medicine, etc. There are some limitations, of course; for example, this chatbot is unable to generate responses to personal questions. But in general, this is a great tool for blog writing due to its accessibility (it’s free and supports multiple languages) and simplicity (all communication with the bot is in the form of simple chat).

Grammarly
This AI tool is especially loved by proofreaders and content editors. Grammarly is one of the most well-known AI writing tools. It is popular because it is simple and easy to use. It will highlight any typos or grammar errors, make suggestions, and even provide feedback on the clarity, engagement, and delivery of your content.

You can access its AI proofreader within your emails, WordPress editor, documents, and more by using the Grammarly app interface or installing the browser extension. The online writing assistant is available for free. Grammarly, on the other hand, has premium plans starting at $12 per month. Paid plans include advanced features like a plagiarism checker.

Jasper
The great multifunctional AI for blogging is Jasper. It has a powerful markup language that allows you to easily customize the content to meet the needs of the user. The advanced natural language processing technology used by Jasper ensures text accuracy, consistency, and readability.

It includes a plethora of writing tools that can assist you in creating almost anything. Among its features are: content summarizer, blog post outline, content improver, listicle, paragraph generator, SEO descriptions, tone detector, perfect headline, etc. This tool has a 5-day free trial for 10,000 words and two paid options: boss mode and $49/month for 50,000 words, and up to $500/month for 700,000 words.

Writesonic
This is one of the most multifunctional AI tools I have ever seen. The variety of functions that Writesonic offers is incredible! Among its features are:

ChatSonic (like ChatGPT);
Article writer;
Make your own AI;
Blog titles;
Paragraph writer;
Article ideas;
Article outlines;
Ads and marketing tools (Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google ad titles, etc.);
Text extender;
E-commerce tools (product descriptions, features, titles);
Social media content making (Twitter thread generator, content plan, Instagram captions, etc.);
Landing pages for websites;
Call for action for websites.

That’s just a small part of all the features available with Writesonic. This is a truly amazing and comprehensive AI tool that can help you with everything. This tool has a free trial where 10,000 words are available for 1 month and premium subscription plans with pricing starting at $13 for 60,000 words/month.

Frase
The final AI on my list is used mostly for creating and optimizing SEO-focused content. It creates content briefs and blog articles while also optimizing them for keywords.

This AI content writer tool, in particular, is an excellent choice if you work with a large team. It includes collaboration features such as the ability to share editable links and create project folders.

Frase provides a free trial. After that, a premium upgrade will set you back $44.99 per month.

As a conclusion, I’d like to point out that any AI that you use in your blog must be considered as a support and help for your creativity and efforts, but not as a substitute:)

I hope this content will be useful for your future blog posts!

GitHub repositories for TypeScript enthusiasts

Rita Brown — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 16:03:29 +0000

GitHub is a great source for the developer community. It offers an ability to share, learn, and create code based on various programming languages. In today’s post, I'd like to share with you my favorite GitHub repositories for mastering TypeScript knowledge!

- DefinitelyTyped

DefinitelyTyped is a Github repository that hosts a library of high-quality TypeScript type definitions. Developers can share and maintain TypeScript type definitions for JS libraries in this open-source repository. It primarily serves as a TypeScript translator for JS developers. They can find TypeScript equivalents for existing JS libraries using DefinitelyTyped and its declaration statements.

Developers can help the repository by adding definitions, testing them, and making pull requests, among other things. This is a very popular page, with thousands of contributors and many more users, because it directly helps developers with their work.

43.3K Stars

- TypeScript (Microsoft)

This is the repository where all essential information about TypeScript is collected. You can find there official links to the TypeScript specifications, pieces of code with examples, engage in discussions with other developers, and contribute to this repository by adding issues and solutions for them.

Microsoft's TypeScript repository is an excellent resource for those who are just beginning to learn TypeScript.

89.7K Stars

- Nest

This repository is useful for those who want to improve their TypeScript skills and start building Node.Js applications. Nest is a framework for creating scalable, efficient Node.js server-side applications. It is built with TypeScript (which ensures compatibility with pure JavaScript) and combines elements of OOP (Object Oriented Programming), FP (Functional Programming), and FRP (Functional Reactive Programming).

55.3K Stars

- Awesome TypeScript

Awesome Typescript offers a great collection of different resources connected with this programming language. There you can find resources for client-side and server-side development and many useful pieces of code for improving your TypeScript skills.

This repository has many resources, such as books, playgrounds, projects, IDEs, tools, types, and many other things that describe different aspects of working with TypeScript.

3.6K Stars

- Deno

Deno is a simple, modern, and secure JavaScript and TypeScript runtime written in Rust that uses V8. This is an awesome runtime where, by default, security is enabled. TypeScript is supported out of the box, which is pretty great for me. Also, all necessary utilities are pre-installed, so you don’t have to spend your time on it and can start working right after Reno installation.

88.6K Stars

- React (TypeScript Cheatsheets)

These are amazing TypeScript cheatsheets for experienced React developers just starting out. There are 4 major types of cheatsheets: basic, advanced, migratory, and the HOC cheatsheets. Each has its own description, guidelines, code examples, and demands for those who are going to study this material. There are also video tutorials and multiple languages available.

40.1K Stars

- Type Challenges

Everyone who has ever heard or worked with TypeScript knows that types play a major role in this programming language. This repository is intended to help users better understand the type system, write their own utilities, or simply have fun with the challenges. What I like best about this repository is that it is no longer just a collection of data, but also a well-organized and developed community of TypeScript experts who are open to any kind of collaboration and audience communication.

31.6K Stars

What is the future of AI?

Rita Brown — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:41:12 +0000

Recently, when I saw another article about ChatGPT, I thought, "What's the big deal of it? Why is everyone talking and writing about it?" In my attempts to find answers to these questions, I found dozens of posts about AI in general. And I’m wondering, if artificial intelligence is such a popular topic right now, does this mean that it is the start of a new era of human development?

Admittedly, artificial intelligence is shaping humanity's future in nearly every industry. It is already the primary driver of emerging technologies such as big data, robotics, and IoT, not to mention generative AI, with tools such as ChatGPT and AI art generators gaining mainstream attention, and it will remain a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.

ChatGPT gained its popularity because its creators used an innovative method of AI training called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This method was earlier implemented in DeepMind's Sparrow and Anthropic's Claude, but OpenAI (the ChatGPT creator company) is undoubtedly the AI project that succeeded in implementing this model the most. That is why people are now talking about ChatGPT and using it widely for different purposes.

Before ChatGPT's introduction to the world, the topic of AI was also quite popular among the developer community because people realized that this technology had become real. With the current level of technological development, the things we saw in movies like The Terminator or The Matrix do not seem so fictional and unrealistic. And that’s the main reason for such an interest to the field of artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg; in fact, AI tools are widely used in various fields, like:

Navigation;
Marketing,
Robotics;
Gaming;
Healthcare.

These are only a few examples where AI is already applicable. And that’s just the beginning; the AI we know right now is at the start of its development, and such breakthroughs as the one with ChatGPT illustrate that with every new AI tool, there will be more improvements in mechanisms and AI functions.

In which industries can AI be beneficial in the future?
Here, I'd like to share my thoughts and predictions on the top three fields where artificial intelligence can be developed the most in the future:

Health care
I already mentioned this industry as one of those where AI is currently developing. The introduction of AI into healthcare has been revolutionary, reshaping how we diagnose, treat, and monitor patients. This technology is significantly improving healthcare research and outcomes by allowing for more accurate diagnoses and personalized treatments. The ability of AI in healthcare to quickly analyze vast amounts of clinical documentation assists medical professionals in identifying disease markers and trends that would otherwise go unnoticed.

In the future, I believe that it will be possible for people to use AI for not only making clearer predictions of diagnoses but also tracking their health condition without going to the doctor on a daily basis. Furthermore, it is crucial to implement AI in the healthcare bureaucratic system to avoid information loss or confusion and to create a worldwide system of patient and disease tracking.

The most difficult challenge for AI in these healthcare domains is ensuring their adoption in daily clinical practice, not whether the technologies will be capable enough to be useful.

Entrepreneurship
The role of AI in entrepreneurship in a broader sense is now underestimated in my mind. Imagine how people can implement multiple AI tools in their businesses to improve task management, teamwork, financial processes, and many other aspects of their operations.

Here, I'd like to point out that I don’t mean that in the future AI (or robots) will steal our job (which is, btw, possible but the topic of a completely different post). What I mean is that AI is helpful in process automation, which in turn leads to the better working of the whole business.

Also, AI can be helpful in data analytics, which allows businesses to gain insights that were previously inaccessible by discovering new patterns and correlations in their data. The development of chatbot technology is already a great help for customer service, but in the next decade it will probably gain even more power in terms of collecting data about customers and making predictions for successful business development.

Of course, I should mention the marketing and SEO power of AI. The current mechanisms of product promotion help businessmen attract people to their goods and services. In the future, there will be no single product or service that will not use AI tools for promotion.

Robotics
The final field is probably one of the most exciting for me because living in a world where we are all surrounded by robots is a dream that I hope will soon come true. What if one day you wake up and see a human-like robot who tells you, "You are terminated." I would be shocked and happy at the same time if that happened.

But all jokes aside, robotics development with the help of AI is useful because, in that case, all dangerous jobs now done by real people can be done by robots, which a) will be more efficient, and b) will save a lot of human resources. For example, we can use robots for building, working with dangerous products such as radiation, performing medical operations, etc.

Although robotics and AI are two distinct concepts, they are correlated. Developers are now struggling with combining these two concepts to create robots that will not just be automated for performing some functions but also be able to analyze situations and make their own decisions. Now, the number of actions that can be performed by robots is limited, but in a few decades, when developers figure out how to insert AI into robots, we will get some useful helpers.

Final thoughts
The true challenge of AI is figuring out how natural intelligence works. Creating artificial intelligence isn't like creating an artificial heart — scientists don't have a simple, concrete model to work from. We do know that the brain contains billions of neurons and that we think and learn by connecting different neurons electrically. However, we don't know how all of these connections add up to higher reasoning or even low-level operations. The intricate circuitry appears to be incomprehensible.

The attention that such tools as ChatGPT bring to the topic of AI development will increase within the next decade. And I truly believe that it is very beneficial to the whole field. The more attention AI gets, the more developers will try to make their contribution to it, which obviously will bring some major breakthroughs to the field. However, humankind must be careful in its inventions, and AI is no exception. We should always remember that not all inventions are safe for humankind (e.g., the invention of a nuclear weapon), and that’s where governmental representatives must include appropriate amendments to current laws.

All in all, artificial intelligence applications are likely to have a significant impact on critical aspects of our economy and society in the coming decade. We are in the early stages of what many credible experts believe will be the most promising era in technological innovation and value creation in the foreseeable future.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments!

Top 5 social network APIs

Rita Brown — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 14:50:24 +0000

Social networks have become an unavoidable part of people's daily lives. We can hardly imagine the modern world without Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. People began to use social networks for business purposes as they became more widely available around the world. Many of the "big" social networks have released their own APIs to give developers greater access to the networks' functionality and the ability to incorporate features into their own apps.

Below, I’ve prepared a list of social network APIs that might be useful for developers.

Facebook API

The first API on my list will definitely be the Facebook API. It is not only one of the oldest social media APIs, but also one of the most complex and comprehensive. The greatest advantage of this API is that it is completely free. To get access to this API, you will need to be registered as a developer on Facebook, which can be easily done via your personal Facebook profile.

As for the API functions, Facebook offers a number of SDKs and APIs that developers may use to access its data and enhance the functionality of their applications. The primary method of accessing the platform's data is through the Facebook Graph API, which is an HTTP-based API. You can access pages, post images, query data, create new stories, and do other operations using this API.

Many users may find the Facebook API too complicated, especially the documentation, but if you take some time to explore it properly, you will understand how many options it offers users.

Link to docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/

Instagram API

Instagram became the most popular social network for posting photo and video content in recent years. Instagram is a part of the Facebook company, and they share API specifications and authentication requirements. Instagram Graph API is a set of Facebook Graph API endpoints that allow apps to access data from Instagram Professional accounts (both Business and Creator accounts). This API allows users to manage and publish media objects, discover other businesses, track mentions, analyze valuable metrics, moderate comments, and search hashtags.

This API is also completely free. One of the main advantages is that Instagram is an extremely popular social network, so there is a large community of developers who actively support and help each other solve different issues.

Link to docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/overview

Discord API

Discord, a platform originally much-loved by the gaming community, now represents a place where different types of people can share their thoughts by doing voice and video chats, creating topic-based channels, and simply "hanging out" in a digital world. The idea of the Discord API is that it enables developers to build bots or extend the functionality of their app using data and services exposed by Discord.

The feature I personally like in this API is that it supports REST API calls and WebSocket connections. Via WebSocket, users can get real-time data about actions on some Discord channels (members, activities like comments). Via the REST API, users can perform a wider range of actions, including not only streaming data but also getting or changing data about users or channels, for example.

The Discord API is completely free, but users need to get access tokens to make API calls (this can be easily done; check the official docs).

Link to docs: https://discord.com/developers/docs/intro

Reddit API

Reddit is a popular social network for discussing a wide range of topics like clothes and pets, politics and finances, crypto and technologies, etc. This API is not as broad in functions as the previous ones, even though it has a number of useful functions.

The main purpose of the Reddit API is to allow developers to access user-submitted and rated content on the website. Although this API is quite simple and helpful for developers, it has messy official documentation. If you want to use the Reddit API, my advice is to look for documentation in the developers subreddit; it will be much more useful.

All in all, the Reddit API is free and requires only using an access token, and what's more important, it has clear and easily understandable endpoints and queries for making API calls.

Link to docs: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/

TikTok API

Last but not least, there is the TikTok API.TikTok gained its popularity almost immediately after it was presented to the public. This API allows you to make REST API calls to get data about TikTok users and videos.Also, it has a WebHooks function (which is similar to WebSocket connections) that, via subscription, notifies users about an event that happens on TikTok using the POST method.

The disadvantage of this API is its documentation, which, even though it looks very pretty, is quite short and doesn’t give much information about all the API calls users can make.

This API is also free and requires an access token for making API calls.

Link to Docs: https://developers.tiktok.com/doc/tiktok-api-v2-introduction/

I hope you enjoyed this post!