Automation

For some reason, my daily archive of Finland’s “clear news” broadcast didn’t work today. Why not? TL;DR: Just a Git snafu. Quick recap of the archive: There are 3 Git repos: selkouutiset-scrape simply scrapes the HTML https://yle.fi/selkouutiset at 6 PM every day via a Github Action. selkouutiset-scrape-cleaned pulls in scrape and turns it into a stack of translated, properly-named Markdown files, by the magic of shell scripts, systemd timers, and a tiny VM in a datacenter somewhere....

I’ve discovered one big downside of [putting systemd times into ~/.config/systemd/user/][1]: They stop running when you log out. Two ways around this problem: Bite the bullet, and install the timers into /etc/systemd/. This means giving up chezmoi version control, making the overall system more snowflake-y. I’m not crazy about it. Remote in with tmux, instead of ever logging out, just use C-b d to detach from the session. I’m going with #2....

Some more updates to the main repo of this TIL site today, in particular I have added a new fzf-tags.fish script. til uses this script to Scrapes all the YAML tags: frontmatter from all current Markdown posts, Puts me into a multi-select fzf menu containing them, and Puts anything I select into the tags: of the new blog post. Tags form natural breadcrumb trails throughout a blog as it grows organically over time....

Tonight I was hacking away at some more little automations to make this TIL nice and presentable over at https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/. Git has a wonderful system called “hooks” which live under .git/hooks/, come loaded with examples so you can remember how they all work, and – surprisingly – don’t contain a local post-push hook! There’s post-receive, but that expects to be able to run a script on the server side – not helpful when I’m pushing to one of Github’s many, many anonymous boxes....