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Automating My /Now Page
- kaeruct 2y agoNice, 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 2y agoThanks 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 2y agoA 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 2y agoNoted! 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 2y agoLooks great! My website has a /life page (https://anandchowdhary.com/life 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 https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/life and built using GitHub Actions.
- teekert 2y agoCool 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 2y agoHaha indeed... if it helps, I built https://stethoscope.js.org https://stethoscope.js.org where I used official & unofficial APIs and takeout exports to compile everything in one place.
- akashgoswami 2y agoThis looks cool! I'll have to look into it :)
- akashgoswami 2y agoThis 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 2y agoLooks like https://fresh.deno.dev/ https://fresh.deno.dev/
- anandchowdhary 2y agoIndeed! I redesign my personal website every few years (https://anandchowdhary.com/about/versions https://anandchowdhary.com/about/versions) and use a different stack every time.
- anandchowdhary 2y agoHaha 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%.
- willhackett 2y agoVery 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 2y agoThanks. 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 2y agoSo 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoNot 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 https://indieweb.org/WebFinger
- reaperducer 2y agoNo, I'm looking for the old school CLI finger. >finger user@example.com Though I find the new version intriguing.
- mxuribe 2y agoWhile 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 2y agoI always felt like .plan was more of an about page, and .project was the now page.
- ericyd 2y agoI 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 2y agoYou 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 2y agoIn 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.
- akashgoswami 2y agoIt was clear :) Thanks for giving it a read and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I plan on hopefully writing more posts in my free time
- 2y ago
- pflenker 2y agoI 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 https://philippflenker.com/now [0]: https://nownownow.com/about https://nownownow.com/about
- akashgoswami 2y agoI 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 2y agoThe way I handle it is having separate pages for stuff that updates often and then link them from my now page.
- akashgoswami 2y agoI'm planning on having pages like this soon! I want to have something like a /bookshelf with books I've already read
- sivers 2y agohttps://nownownow.com/ 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.
- Arainach 2y agoI'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 2y agoI'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.
- al_borland 2y agoI feel the same way. I find tracking exhausting, because if I’m going to do it I want it to be correct, which takes a lot of effort. In some cases it’s not really possible to be correct, which causes me a great deal of stress if/when I try. That said, some people are into it. This post from Stephen Wolfram is something I think about often. It’s cool to see, but not something I could ever realistically do. Kind of like the people who take a picture of themselves every day for 20 years. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...
- jp57 2y agoIs 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 2y agovery nice! My website has a /open-dashboard page (https://www.pankajtanwar.in/open-dashboard 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 2y agoThis is pretty cool! How are you tracking workouts/bike stats? Is that manually tracked somewhere or done automatically?
- the2ndfloorguy 2y agothanks :) mine is manual + some of them, automated. i built a custom telegram bot which periodically/on-demand asks for data points, run basic algos to calculates these stats and push to realtime firebase storage.
- ahmedbaracat 2y agoI 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 2y agohttps://akashgoswami.dev/now https://akashgoswami.dev/now is a 404 ... A for effort?
- akashgoswami 2y agoI should add a re-direct but it's on my personal website here https://akashgoswami.com/now 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
- jxi 2y agohttps://akashgoswami.com/now/ https://akashgoswami.com/now/
- jamietanna 2y agoI update my /now page manually (https://www.jvt.me/now/ https://www.jvt.me/now/) and prefer it that way to make it intentional. For some level of automated updates, I have my README (https://readme.jvt.me https://readme.jvt.me or ie https://github.com/jamietanna/jamietanna https://github.com/jamietanna/jamietanna) that provides a more recent view of things There's a lot of stuff I track, like podcasts I listen to (https://www.jvt.me/kind/listens/ https://www.jvt.me/kind/listens/) or number of steps I take (https://www.jvt.me/kind/steps/ https://www.jvt.me/kind/steps/) but I don't feel like things like that should be on my /now (I do need to rethink what is on my /now page, tbh)