Slack Developer Blog is Slack's Medium publication with announcements and guides for building bots, apps, and integrations on its platform.
HN links it for platform announcements and guides, including a link unfurling article commenters point to for making site previews work.
If I read this correctly, the "Enterprise Grid" section hints at one technical reason for this move. Slack recently announced[0] a new feature that allows multiple teams, err "Workspaces", to share a channel. This violates the uniqueness of @usernames within the namespace of the shared channel, e.g. both teams having a "@john".
This announcement anticipates (a) getting developers to use surrogate UIDs instead of @username for mentions, and (b) that their clients will only use display names in the future and rely on specific UI elements to distinguish ambiguous ones.
[0] https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/network-effects-getting-ready-for-shared-channels-600b7cc776df
Their dev blog post [0] mentions an AWS Lambda Blueprint to go along with a chatbot framework (BotKit) and an "Add to Slack" workflow. This (AWS Lambda) is a smart move; it reduces the friction of writing a quick integration with Slack considerably, making it almost a commodity-level feature. This bet on AWS Lambda will likely be a big deal for general AWS Lambda adoption, given how insanely popular Slack integrations are.
[0]: https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-platform-114754258b91#.jp25qhvsl
This is similar to statsbot.co 's Slack bot
You would message the bot something like "sessions for this month", and it would send back a graph.
wonder if you could make a similar bot with google sheets if they provide an api
https://statsbot.co/slack
https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/bots-you-can-count-on-meet-the-developers-behind-statsbot-1ddb2961ead0
Assuming you have some sort of control over the root index.html file, write the appropriate `meta` tags in the header there. This article is old, but has a good, illustrated view of what tags do what. https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-unfurling-but-were-afraid-to-ask-or-how-to-make-your-e64b4bb9254
Suggestion: enable a website preview! https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-unfurling-but-were-afraid-to-ask-or-how-to-make-your-e64b4bb9254
I shared your link in a chat, but it doesn't show itself off: https://i.imgur.com/r5hTqwG.png
(Got good suggestions from the first book I put in, thanks!)
More details on their developer blog: https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/message-buttons-and-the-slack-api-ab938174af70#.zdhye3738