Site Runner Blog

Tag: Matrix

  • Sending events to your Matrix Room (webhook styles)

    Sending events to your Matrix Room (webhook styles)

    A great usage of Slack, and then Discord was being able to have Events coming from your business into a feed alongside other conversations going, it keeps the beating heart front of mind.

    In our case it’s servers advising when they are being rebuilt, code errors and customers signing up and adding new sites.

    Now we’re using Matrix we needed to get these events streaming in. The way we’ve done it is:

    • Created a new Matrix user, ‘pureflowbot’ specifically to broker the Events through
    • Invited this user to our ActivityStream Room
    • Created a persistent token for pureflowbot using Curl commands to the Matrix server (session tokens taken from the client are not persistent)
    • Sending Events from our Node back end and other services via Curl
    • There are libraries available which would be handy and we might use in the future, we’ll update this if/when we do.The beauty of what we have now is it’s a very minimal code base


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  • Matrix & Digital Sovereignty

    Things have been changing fast on the internet. Especially for people outside of the bubble that is the USA.

    A couple of years it was laughable to think having your business relying on Google, Facebook and Slack was a problem, now it’s not uncommon to hear people talking about it as a potential business risk.

    It all comes down to Digital Sovereignty, the idea that the more you own of your digital footprint, and the closer that is to you geographically, the simpler looking after it will be in times of crisis.

    To that end we use as many open source and open standard tools as possible. Thunderbird for email, Firefox and Vivaldi for web browsing, Ubuntu and Kubuntu as work station operating systems and from yesterday Matrix and Element to replace Discord/Slack.
    What is Matrix

    Slack pioneered the use of chat channels within a single workspace. The idea being that separating concerns was better than having a single company wide chat. It really works.

    Matrix is an opensource project that recreates the idea but lets organisations run their own code, the messages are also end to end encrypted. It’s Ad free and doesn’t try to get you to buy virtual gems or rubies or whatever (Grrr Discord)!

    What we’re using Matrix for:

    • Team communications
    • Catching events and errors into an Activity Feed so we can all see what is going on within our servers (using a purpose created Matrix user and Curl it’s surprisingly easy to setup)
    • Customer support room – most of our customers don’t seem to need much support but it is there if they need it 🙂

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