[HN Gopher] Automating My /Now Page
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Automating My /Now Page
Author : akashgoswami
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-08-16 09:27 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (akashgoswami.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (akashgoswami.dev)
| kaeruct wrote:
| Nice, took a while to find the actual now page to see.
|
| You should look into why this is being double-scaped:
|
| >Kiki’s Delivery Service
| akashgoswami wrote:
| Thanks for spotting that. I do have a function to check for
| HTML escaping to handle things like this but it seems like I
| might have missed the check for this. I'll add it in soon.
|
| >Nice, took a while to find the actual now page to see.
|
| I'll try and update the page to make that a bit clearer
| corobo wrote:
| A link at the end of the post where you link to the source
| code would do it - that's where I was when I was tilted into
| action to check it out anyway
|
| On topic: intriguing idea. I may have to have a look at
| something like this next time I'm procrastinating doing
| something else haha
|
| Bonus points for linking to all of your research and
| discovery, that's super helpful - nice one :)
| akashgoswami wrote:
| Noted! I'll add an extra mention of it. I thought I had it
| covered in the first line of the post but it's probably a
| good idea to link it again at the end of the post as well
|
| I would highly recommend looking into something like this.
| I found the whole process really interesting and I used
| what I learnt on this project in later projects as well.
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Looks great! My website has a /life page
| (https://anandchowdhary.com/life) where I track all my life &
| health data, including: - yearly themes and
| quarterly personal OKRs - my live location (yes, really)
| - books I read, music I listen to - biomarkers, health and
| fitness data, sleep records
|
| They are all tracked on GitHub as open source JSON APIs:
| https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/life and built using GitHub
| Actions.
| teekert wrote:
| Cool page! Maybe you can ask some data brokers what
| interoperability standards they use so you can provide the
| correct file to them, perhaps even negotiate a good price for
| the data ;)
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Haha indeed... if it helps, I built
| https://stethoscope.js.org where I used official & unofficial
| APIs and takeout exports to compile everything in one place.
| akashgoswami wrote:
| This is really cool! I hope to get to something that looks like
| this one day. Love how your 'Move in to new house' KPI is at
| 119%
|
| You've got a pretty awesome website! Is this made using NextJS?
| open592 wrote:
| Looks like https://fresh.deno.dev/
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Indeed! I redesign my personal website every few years
| (https://anandchowdhary.com/about/versions) and use a
| different stack every time.
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Haha the OKR progress is also dependent on how far we are in
| the quarter, so if I do something too quickly, it has the
| tendency to go above 100%.
| hhh wrote:
| For location, I don't see a pin but see a window centered on an
| area in Utrecht. Is the centerpoint supposed to be cords of
| your location?
|
| Cool idea!
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| I only store the geolocation up to 2 decimal places so it's
| rounded a little to not expose my precise-precise location,
| but more of a city-level location (source: https://github.com
| /AnandChowdhary/location/blob/d82432169621...).
| willhackett wrote:
| I love this! Nice work!
| efilife wrote:
| You have an eye for beautiful design
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Thank you, kind stranger. :)
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| This data is super dangerous to reveal. Unless you provide fake
| data to fool strangers deliberately.
| rd wrote:
| Which parts are dangerous to the average chum with no
| enemies?
| criddell wrote:
| Live location
| stonogo wrote:
| I don't think knowing what city he's in is particularly
| dangerous.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| He got a new house (likely with new furniture and
| appliances). Best time to rob the house is when he is in
| a different city.
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Haha that's true. I do only store the geolocation up to 2
| decimal places so it's rounded a little, but people do
| find out when I leave town. Luckily I have camera/alarm
| systems/etc. but maybe my insurance will tell me I
| brought this on myself. I even had
| https://x.com/anandstalker live-tweeting it before
| Twitter made their API too expensive.
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| maybe I do... we'd never know!
| willhackett wrote:
| Very cool.
|
| I once did something similar using sockets and Cloudflare's
| Durable Objects. I had my current playing song, workout minutes
| and git commit count.
|
| It was a bit unreliable when I switched to Apple Music so it's
| gone away for now.
|
| This has inspired me to make it again.
| akashgoswami wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Your project also sounds interesting. I did think about how I
| could add/track loads of different things on my site, but given
| it's a static website, I decided to keep things simple.
|
| Music was a bit tricky to track and the update frequency would
| have been too high for my site so I just left it out for now.
| Maybe I'll go back and change that one day in the future if I
| change my mind.
| rcarmo wrote:
| So this is like a finger ~/.plan file, but in HTML.
|
| It's kind of fun to compare the amount of resources used between,
| say, John Carmack's time at id and this - I would bet this
| requires several orders of magnitude more compute :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| I recently looked into setting up a finger server on a spare
| Ubuntu box, but came up with nothing useful.
|
| Admittedly, I didn't look very hard, so if anyone has some
| pointers, please share.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Not sure if what you implemented was the legacy style of
| finger or the newer webfinger...but the indieweb community
| certainly uses (or used to use?) webfinger for discovery.
| See: https://indieweb.org/WebFinger
| reaperducer wrote:
| No, I'm looking for the old school CLI finger.
| >finger user@example.com
|
| Though I find the new version intriguing.
| mxuribe wrote:
| While I've only done it very few times...whenever i have
| set up old school things, the challenge is ALWAYS that i
| end up being alone - with no one to play with said stuff.
| So, the initial fun always wears off. But, I'm glad that
| you have undertaken playing around with old school
| finger, and wish you well and hope you have some good
| fun! :-)
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I always felt like .plan was more of an about page, and
| .project was the now page.
| ericyd wrote:
| I would posit that this post is a more useful entry into a /now
| page than a collection of data from third party services. If I
| want to follow my friends' interests in a specific area of media
| (e.g. movies) then I'm inclined to log in to that service and see
| their recent reviews. I'm not sure an aggregator like this
| actually provides value to readers. On the other hand, reading
| about a fun software project about integrating with disparate
| APIs via custom Go scripts seems like a much more interesting
| personal site post. I guess I'm just really not sold on the
| benefits of a /now page.
| akashgoswami wrote:
| You bring up some valid points here!
|
| Yes of course someone could log into a service and see what
| their friend has reviewed recently. That would however require
| someone to go through the effort of creating an account on each
| of these services/websites.
|
| I think using those services/websites is great for keeping a
| general track of what friends are watching, playing, reading,
| etc, is great, however, it's not orientated around an
| individual. That's what the now page tries to achieve. Instead
| of checking a friend's status/logs across multiple sites, you
| can just find everything on their now page (or more
| specifically, my now page).
|
| The purpose of this post was just to walk through how it all
| worked. A lot of this stuff was new for me and I got to learn
| quite a few things in the process that I then went on to use in
| other projects so in my eyes, I think working on this was an
| overall success :)
| ericyd wrote:
| In case my original comment wasn't clear, I thought your post
| was cool and interesting. I also use Hugo but had never
| considered the challenges of automating something like that.
| I liked the write up a lot.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| But if /now -pages had a standard format you could use an
| aggregator to gather data from all of your friends /now pages
| to a single location. =)
| pflenker wrote:
| I think it's a bit sad that /now pages are going into a direction
| of listicles/media people consume and so on. The original
| explanation about what /now pages are has this following sentence
| [0]: "Think of what you'd tell a friend you hadn't seen in a
| year.". This, in my opinion, encapsulates the beauty of /now
| pages. When I see a friend after a year, I do not start by
| listing all the books I read recently - I start with my life in
| broad strokes (and _then_ I might go into these listicles). I
| wish /now pages went back to this. Here's mine, by the way:
| https://philippflenker.com/now
|
| [0]: https://nownownow.com/about
| akashgoswami wrote:
| I have seen people listing the media they are consuming but I
| would like to think of it as them posting what is important to
| them.
|
| While I do have media on my now page, I still do have some
| sections that are updated manually (mainly the top half of the
| page). To me travel is more important than media and a lot more
| of my friends ask me where I've been recently, hence why I put
| that higher up on the page over the media stuff.
|
| Anyway, might be something for me to think about later on if I
| decide to switch up the format (which I likely will)
| katzinsky wrote:
| The way I handle it is having separate pages for stuff that
| updates often and then link them from my now page.
| akashgoswami wrote:
| I'm planning on having pages like this soon! I want to have
| something like a /bookshelf with books I've already read
| sivers wrote:
| https://nownownow.com/ is still hand-made by me, not automated.
|
| The only way a website gets added there is if the owner emails
| me, and I checked out the /now page, and decided to add it.
|
| Every now and then I get a submission that's like "We here at
| XYZ widgets are currently focused on quality, service, and low
| prices." I don't add those.
|
| And there's absolutely no monetization on the website, and
| never will be. It only takes a few minutes per week to do this.
|
| Point is: please don't worry about enshittification of /now
| pages. What Akash is doing here is a fun project, and /now
| pages in general are not going the listicle direction.
| rolisz wrote:
| I think GP is complaining about a change of topic of /now,
| not that it becomes corporate SEO gamified.
| yaj54 wrote:
| Agreed. I really like the concept of the now page as a succinct
| quarterly update. I want it to only change once per quarter.
|
| I also really like consolidated news feeds of one persons
| activity across all platforms (which seems more like what these
| "auto now" page attempts are going for).
|
| I think we need a new term. I would like to call it /feed. It
| could even be implemented as an rss/atom/activitypub aggregate
| feed of all a user's activity across publishing platforms.
|
| /feed
|
| Let's make it a thing. And let's keep /now as the quarterly
| update.
|
| (also, your now page link is not resolving)
| Arainach wrote:
| I'm curious how folks feel after trying to compile information
| like this long term. Data is cool, but constantly logging
| everything you do in discrete chunks is not. Not only the
| constant demands from every company you interact with to "fill
| out this short survey" and rank things, but to log every book I
| read, every calorie I consume, every beer I drink....it's
| exhausting and I've burned out hard on all of it. Do people
| actually keep up with this for more than a few months?
| rolisz wrote:
| I've actually written a tool to track all my "podcasts" (in
| quotes because it includes long form videos, courses and other
| things). It brings me incredible joy.
|
| In the same app I can track books I want or that I've read and
| other things.
|
| I've been doing this for 2 years.
| jp57 wrote:
| Is it just me, or does a desire to tell the whole world what
| you're up to every moment feel very ten-years-ago?
| thimabi wrote:
| I don't see now pages this way. For me, they have always been
| about having a personal space in the midst of an increasingly
| commercial web, where few things are under our control.
|
| While I don't have a now page myself, I do appreciate the
| efforts of those who try to decentralize the internet -- even
| if some of their pages might appear mundane to others.
| Dachande663 wrote:
| I still have a /now page, but it follows the 2007 Web 2.0 trend
| of basically been a stream from audioscrobbler, Flickr, blog etc
| (or their modern replacements). Life updates are just blog posts
| the2ndfloorguy wrote:
| very nice! My website has a /open-dashboard page
| (https://www.pankajtanwar.in/open-dashboard) and I'm putting : -
| workout data - current location - social media metrics - my bike
| report card (every single expense, performance etc)
| akashgoswami wrote:
| This is pretty cool!
|
| How are you tracking workouts/bike stats? Is that manually
| tracked somewhere or done automatically?
| ahmedbaracat wrote:
| I love the idea of a /Now page. I just wished there was a way to
| make it only accessible to people I care about enough to share
| these. Or a way to have certain sections private unless you are a
| close friend for an example.
| moralestapia wrote:
| https://akashgoswami.dev/now is a 404
|
| ... A for effort?
| akashgoswami wrote:
| I should add a re-direct but it's on my personal website here
| https://akashgoswami.com/now
|
| I've linked the now page in the first line of the post
|
| The .dev site is where I'll be writing more technical posts
| while my .com site is for everything not tech/coding
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(page generated 2024-08-16 23:01 UTC)