Data engine: tell me when something interesting has happened

Continuing the discussion from RSS Readers Self Hosted "Private Cloud" or Otherwise:

I didn’t have a response at the time, but I’ve been thinking about this, and I want to say that I want two things:

  1. To not be distracted
  2. To not miss anything

Slowly scanning archives by headlines and manipulating it locally is pretty useful in that regard. Think about it: you could just have someone’s text archive locally, to mark as read or pass to whatever commands from newsboat, it gets pretty hacker’s paradise real quick!

But I do notice I skip over a lot of content. And I’ve been working on using MediaWiki to watch feeds and importing data from problematic and/or boring data sources. Think project blogs that rarely have relevant content, or repo info from GitHub. There are loads more examples I know of I personally want to track in this manner.

And the neat thing is, I can set how often these data pages should update themselves, and relying on useful features from MediaWiki, such as subscribing to changes and seeing changes over time. It also means I have that data saved for my own purposes, providing:

  • caching
  • accessibility
  • privacy

Pretty cool, huh? I’m working with a staging site I don’t wanna share, it is quite messy, and I am not committed to keep it up for much longer. But I’ll be shouting about it a lot, soon. :slight_smile:

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