Holger's Blog

So today I read this interesting conversation by @rknightuk. The topic isn’t “finished” and he might post updates on the topic. If he remembers he might add them to the conversation. But maybe he doesn’t. (I wouldn’t blame him!)

That brings me to the question: How could I make sure I don’t miss the update? Checking in daily is one option. It’s unrealistic for me though. If you consider the case that you want to see posts from someone you don’t follow/subscribe to, how can you make sure you get updates on things you might care about?

This is just me thinking out loud, I don’t know the answer, yet.

Maybe there could be a service that monitors their feed for certain keywords and pings you once they post something containing those keywords? There isn’t even the option to subscribe to a conversation as that conversation doesn’t have an RSS feed associated. One way would be to have a service that subscribes to his RSS feed and monitors that one for designated keywords. If it finds the keywords it creates a post mentioning me.

What comes to mind for me is a CRON job running on a server. But that sucks. Using cron doesn’t feel right to me today. Another idea was to have a GitHub action running. But that always needs a trigger to get started. So what could be a trigger?

goes away to read GitHub Actions docs

Turns out: You can schedule a workflow on GitHub actions, using cron syntax. Awesome! I mean it’s still somehow cron, but it’s more accessible than some bash thingy on some server.

So what is left is figuring out, what the GitHub Actions workflow should run. It could be a javascript or ruby script inside the repository that the workflow belongs to.

• This script needs read/write access to a micro.blog (or other fediverse) account that can send @mentions to me.
• The script needs to parse the feed (in this example micro.blog/rknightuk…) for keywords
• I need an option to provide the keywords. Could be hard-wired into the script for starters
• if a keyword is found, create a new post mentioning me and containing the link
• since this could be high-volume as the keywords are maybe too broad it shouldn’t mention/ping the creator of the post

It doesn’t sound too complicated right now. I’ll leave that for later and will come back to this idea!

edit: this sounds like a solution that probably already exists. if you know about something like this, let me know. maybe you could even use google alerts or something like this!

Ich habe heute dieses Video gefunden Happiness by Steve Cutts und das passt ganz wunderbar zum Artikel „No other love“ von @Buddenbohm@mastodon.social vom 12. Januar.

I wrote a little tool yesterday to help me normalize my markdown files from the Gatsby site to be able to import them into Micro.blog properly. Especially I wanted to have redirects setup automatically for all the old posts. My site had simple slugs like holgerfrohloff.de/power-laws. Micro.blog sets up the posts using the dates => https://holgerfrohloff.de/2019/03/01/power-laws.html

For that to work, I needed to have the permalink added to the frontmatter. That wasn’t the case for the majority of posts. I didn’t want to change this manually, so I wrote a script thingy to do it for me. https://github.com/5minpause/postsnormalizer

So maybe this could be helpful if you want to migrate a GatsbyJS site to Micro.blog. /cc @manton