Project Oxford is a collection of really cool APIs that Microsoft have been working on and expanding.

They include APIs that cover all sorts of facial recognition, image evaluation and speech tools. Its pretty impressive stuff, they can tell what an image is of, read somebody’s emotions, process natural language and more.

All the documentation is straight forward and they have generous free tiers for most of the APIs with limits of 5,000 calls or more a month.

You can check out just how easy it is to make use of these APIs in my sample project. Its just a simple Express app using ajax to make the calls. Its nice to see that Microsoft haven’t restricted use of them to just Nuget and C#. My example makes use of the Face API and the Emotion API to get gender, age and emotion levels from a photo of a face.

There is an app gallery showing off some of the cool stuff that can be done with the collection of APIs. Annoyingly though, when I wanted to get one for my Windows phone the app only works on Android!

Thanks for looking at my new blog.

I wanted to start a blog to help me keep track of all the things I learn and any useful resources I have used along the way. If anyone else is able to find anything useful on here then all the better.

Blog platform

So I’ve used blogging platforms before, such as Umbraco and Wordpress. I wanted my new blog to be something simple to manage and something that would make me want to write rather than working on the blog. So that pretty much ruled out Umbraco and Wordpress :)

Plus I wanted to learn something new. I’ve been teaching myself Node recently so Ghost looked pretty interesting. However I ran in to some issues during testing with hosting Ghost. I ran in to dependency hell on Azure; that coupled with having to pay to be able to use a custom domain put me off Azure. Ghost’s own hosting looked pretty good but at $8/month, a bit more than I wanted to pay ideally.

So I settled on Jekyll.

Being able to create posts in markdown looked like a massive benefit to me. Not only so all my posts would be nicely source controlled. Hosting the blog on github pages is also another massive plus point.

Setup

After reading the docs for Jekyll i was pretty disappointed. Not in Jekyll but in Windows. Jekyll is yet another tool that is not fully supported on Windows.

I made the big decision to install Ubuntu on to my old laptop. As a Windows user through and through, I’m sure Ubuntu in itself is going to be a learning experience and give me lots to blog about.

Setting up Jekyll itself is super straightforward, with a few commands you have your skeleton and Github pages up and running. You can find the install instructions here

The only pain point I had was with the dependency on Ruby. Using the standard apt-get on Ubuntu I could only figure out how to install 1.9. But for Jekyll I needed 2 or higher. From looking through Stack Overflow I could have downloaded the source and complied it but as a Linux newbie that seemed a little too far off the beaten track for me yet.

Then I found that Brightbox cloud hosting have provided more up to date Ruby packages. Even I was able to follow the instructions they provide here

Next Steps

I want to keep improving this blog

• Maybe add a theme
• Add new posts on what I’ve been learning
• Use this blog to help me improve my front end technologies

Thanks for reading, Martin