
Bespoke software, and a really simple RSS aggregator - jmlr
https://routley.io/posts/bespoke-software-rss-aggregator/
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icebraining
I have to admit (with a bit of shame, as a Free Software fan) that most of the
software I write on a personal basis is like this: bespoke & unpublished. It's
just too damn work for what I expect to be a pretty small audience.

For example, I have a small cron script that emails me today's showtimes for
my local film museum (which shows old films on a large screen) along with the
predicted score from Criticker.

It would be cool if there was some very easy way (I'm lazy!) of letting a non-
techie benefit from this, without me having to deal with a publicly available
server, storing their Criticker credentials, etc.

I guess the easiest way would be a Chrome extension, but I'm not a fan of the
whole app store part, plus I don't want to have to rewrite in JS. And that
still leaves mobile users in the cold, which is dumb.

~~~
ssivark
Basically, we’d like everyone to run their own server where they could add
your process as a unit, rather than you running a server for everyone.

I guess this might have been very useful as a Huginn module. Maybe Urbit
matures to be a functional version of this. The problem is that today’s
computing culture grooms people to be dependent on others’ servers/services,
rather than being in control of one machine of theirs.

~~~
icebraining
I mean, sure, I'd like everyone to run their own server. But in this case I
don't think you'd even need it, a scheduled task in a regular client machine
(smartphone/laptop/etc) would be enough. There just isn't an easy way for me
to turn my script into something that a smartphone can use, without building a
full-fledged app.

~~~
WorldMaker
Windows 8.1 (both phone and desktop) briefly supported Live Tiles driven by
refresh/pull of a tiny bit of metadata you could easily add to the HEAD
section of a webpage. If a user bookmarked that page to their Start Screen,
Windows would poll that page every so often (IIRC as often as once every 30
minutes) and the user would see the notification eventually. It was a neat way
to run very basic scheduled tasks. [1]

I wish something similar had become more common. I understand why all the
platforms are focused on push notifications rather than pull notifications,
but it's so much easier to write a bit of HTML/XML templating than to write
anything with a PWA ServiceWorker and the Push Notifications API.

[1] The one app I built during that brief time was to poll NaNoWriMo for count
API updates. It's a really simple app and was easy to customize with just an
old school HTML method="GET" form.
[https://github.com/WorldMaker/NaNoWriMoAtGlance/](https://github.com/WorldMaker/NaNoWriMoAtGlance/)

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petercooper
Oh neat! Coincidental timing for me too seeing this as I'm procrastinating
finishing up my own similar thing but built on totally different
infrastructure (Ruby, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, so far..) and for a different set
of feeds (several hundred tech engineering blogs). GitHub Actions is something
I did consider, but I'm trying to go AWS for everything recently to learn the
ecosystem more. (The initial results of my own experiment are at
[http://engblogs.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html](http://engblogs.s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html) but it's going to become a 'proper' site as
part of the next step.)

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rhacker
Nice domain name, it's your last name, but I had assumed it was a company that
did some kind of routing :)

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bArray
Nice idea, but it feels like this itself should produce an RSS feed so that
others can benefit from your collection - for the same reason you yourself use
RSS.

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flobosg
Here's another barebones reader from 2018: [https://leancrew.com/all-
this/2018/02/my-feed-reading-system...](https://leancrew.com/all-
this/2018/02/my-feed-reading-system/)

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mattalbie
Thrilled to see this, and I already forked and am using it. This is exactly
what I've been looking for.

