New Media
tl;dr: I added a media section to my website to track and display what I’m reading, listening to, and bookmarking online through automated data collection. visit it here
Recently I spent a few hours hanging out with my friends Claude, Aider, and ChatGPT and added a media section to this site. I really enjoy AI-aided development (maybe a post for later).
The media section has a log of all my books read (tracked from Goodreads), my recently saved tracks (tracked from Spotify), and my links (tracked from feedbin/netnewsreader).
I started posting my links a month or so ago. I wanted to see how the workflow felt. I think it is important for these types of things to just work, without a lot of BS or additional interactions from me. After a month or so, it was fun to see the links that I was saving show up on the site. Like magic.
Why Track?
I did this partially cuz I miss my websites of the past where I manically tracked everything. It was so much fun to see a daily log of everything I consumed and participated in. However, time passed and everything kind of fell apart (mostly my crons).
The other reason I did this was inspired by my friend Simon and his project dog sheep beta. I wanted a robust way to track a bunch of data and save it. I thought about just putting it in sqlite and stuffing it away in a corner of my GitHub to forget about. That is boring tho. I want to force all y’all to see it all in its glory.
Instead of SQLite, I ended up making just a handful of scripts that grab the entities, drop them as YAML files and generate entries for my Hugo blog. The result is ultimately the same - but now I get both the data and the posts.
I love this cuz I can see my media consumption, force you to see it, and store this for later!
RSS Feeds
You can check out the feeds for the individual sections quite easily:
I use NetNewsWire, and feedbin and it works great. Highly Recommended them.
I will post most about RSS at a later date!
Simple Tools Are Better Tools
I love hacking on Hugo. It’s fun and super limited. I find the best things are those with fewer options. I don’t want to have to deal with unlimited optionality and magic - just a bit of magic.
With Hugo, I can just jam a bunch of markdown into a folder with proper front matter, and then it kind of just works.
Beautiful.
YOU IN THE CORNER!
If you want to do something like this yourself, I would recommend checking out micro.blog. It’s awesome and can do similar things. The new micro.one service is a good, cheap way to get started.
New Media
Unrelated to anything: When I worked in politics years and years ago, the generalized term for tech folks, etc., was “new media.” I always found it funny because from my perspective it wasn’t new, it was media.