On: Reclaiming the web with a personal reader

[JZL003]

Sort of related but I've really enjoyed setting up a urlwatch - https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - setup. Especially once you get past the boilerplate of pupetteer and can boot up a chrome instance to scrape websites with javascript. I start to feel like I'm taking control of the web in a push not pull way

There's an amazing power to just monitor websites with no sweat and skim in the morning

- new job openings for companies you like

- new job openings/closings from your current company

- products you're waiting to go on sale/back in stock/available refurbished (got 70% some nice headphones)

- covid sewage stats, if you want to know about spikes

- apartment listings

- github releases you care a lot about (<3 yabai)

- legal-ese for critical websites

Personally I rent a little digital ocean droplet for $5 since I also self host a RSS reader, personal telegram bot, etc (and it's very useful to set up little http site for experimentation) but could do it on your laptop since it doesn't have to run every day at the same time

[Vinnl → JZL003]

Heh, I wrote [1] specifically for the "apartment listings" use case, but instead of notifying you by email, it uses GitHub Actions to create an RSS feed from a couple of CSS selectors.

[1] Feed me up, Scotty! https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/

[toddmorey → JZL003]

I love it! I'm doing something similar: using playwright as a headless browser to log into twitter a couple times a day and pull news & updates for me from saved searches. It's just for me: gives me a digest of twitter updates about the topics I care about without having to endure the site, toxic debates, and annoying ads.

[ornornor → JZL003]

Thanks, I’ve been looking for something like that for quite some time. Even thought about making my own since none exist but it’s been years and I haven’t.