What Is a “Now Page”? | Hacker News Reader

What Is a “Now Page”?

nownownow.com

14 pointsingve9 comments

Yes! This is brilliant. I'll be creating one, as will the missus. Great way of showing people what projects are a current concern as what we've worked on in the past doesn't necessarily reflect current interests.

Here's my Now page: https://www.hammyhavoc.com/now

Anybody remember Unix "plan" files?

It's so weird how much people think other people care about what they're up to.

It's so sad how some people think other people don't have people who care about what they're up to.

It's interesting to read into the tidbits of bloggers' personal lives. Sometimes we (and by that I mean "I") don't quite know what to do with ourselves ("myself") that it becomes food for thought. Seeing yet another developer's blog that's chock full of articles that rehash tutorials online just isn't very inspiring.

If I made a "now page", I'd probably forget about updating it for a while and then it would become a "then page".

So, that new and exiting concept of the now page is... a web version of the *nix finger [1] command where the user has a non-empty .plan and/or .project file.

Those who do not know *nix are bound to reinvent it. Even those who do know *nix reinvent it 'on the web' [2].

[1] man finger or https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger:

   -l Produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information
      described for the -s option as well as the user's home directory,
      home phone number, login shell, mail status, and the contents of
      the files .plan, .project, .pgpkey and .forward from the user's
      home directory.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger

I surely don't run fingerd any longer. :-) Does anyone?

But on this front, /plan is certainly geekier.

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