<p> </p>
<p>The Outbox is an under utilized feature of BipIO for crafting and sending messages to any of your web hooks at a moments notice. You can find it under Dashboard > Apps. It’s great for invoking or testing web services from one place without having to write a client yourself and it just received a great new <a href="http://imperavi.com/redactor/" target="_blank">Redactor</a> overhaul. Keeping in the spirit of BipIO, messages you send with the Outbox are ephemeral in nature, with no history being tracked on the server side unless you explicitly need it. Otherwise, your messages are bound to your browsers local storage only and when they’re gone, they’re gone. <br /><br /><br /><br /> I’m going to show you how to put it to work for <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/" target="_blank">HTML</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text" target="_blank">Plain Text</a>, <a href="http://json.org/" target="_blank">JSON</a> and <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/" target="_blank">Markdown</a> payloads with a short video. And yes, this post was built and published to Tumblr with the Outbox itself!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Incase you don’t know, ‘Web Hook’ Bip’s are a special kind of graph from which you can receive messages from a web browser or app, and perform some workflow based on a payload. Hooks are the workhorse of many of BipIO’s own website logic (so meta!) because they can serve or process data for any application. To come to grips with web hooks, I’m going to fall back to using the ‘my first bip’ hook which you may have already created through the website tour when you first signed up.</p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/98283841?color=c9ff23" frameborder="0" width="500" height="327" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen"></iframe> <br /><br /></p>
<p>Didn’t quite follow? These are the basic rules - <br /><br /><br /></p>
<ul>
<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">HTML mode will send as HTML. ‘HTML Mode’ is when all formatting options are available.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Code mode will send un-formatted text. Toggle HTML/Code mode with the <> button</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">To translate to JSON, hit the ‘Parse JSON’ check box while in code mode</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Unless you’re ‘parsing JSON’, the Outbox exports will be for ‘title’ and ‘body’</li>
</ul>
<p><br /><br /> You may notice I took a couple of seconds to create a Markdown to HTML Channel to handle Markdown parsing, and dropped it onto ‘My First Bip’. Markdown is just plain text, and needs some special treatment. Otherwise HTML, Text and JSON parsing are already handled by the Outbox itself. <br /><br /><br /><br /> Have fun, with great power comes great responsibility! <a href="https://twitter.com/bipioapp" target="_blank">follow me on Twitter</a> and <a href="https://github.com/bipio-server/bipio" target="_blank">fork me on GitHub</a> to see whats happening in the here and now. <br /><br /><br /><br /> [edit] <strong>Exciting news!</strong> JSON, Markdown, HTML and plaintext Outbox modes are compatible with the <a href="https://poetica.com" target="_blank">Poetica</a> Chrome plugin so you can collaborate socially on the full gamut of payload type with joyful, instant abandon!</p>
Putting Your Hooks to Work With the Outbox
Jun 2014/ Posted By: wotio team