Automating My /Now Page | Hacker News Reader

Automating My /Now Page

akashgoswami.dev

104 pointsakashgoswami64 comments

I think it's a bit sad that /now pages are going into a direction of listicles/media people consume and so on. The original explanation about what /now pages are has this following sentence [0]: "Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.". This, in my opinion, encapsulates the beauty of /now pages. When I see a friend after a year, I do not start by listing all the books I read recently - I start with my life in broad strokes (and _then_ I might go into these listicles). I wish /now pages went back to this. Here's mine, by the way: https://philippflenker.com/now

[0]: https://nownownow.com/about

I have seen people listing the media they are consuming but I would like to think of it as them posting what is important to them.

While I do have media on my now page, I still do have some sections that are updated manually (mainly the top half of the page). To me travel is more important than media and a lot more of my friends ask me where I've been recently, hence why I put that higher up on the page over the media stuff.

Anyway, might be something for me to think about later on if I decide to switch up the format (which I likely will)

The way I handle it is having separate pages for stuff that updates often and then link them from my now page.

I'm planning on having pages like this soon! I want to have something like a /bookshelf with books I've already read

https://nownownow.com/ is still hand-made by me, not automated.

The only way a website gets added there is if the owner emails me, and I checked out the /now page, and decided to add it.

Every now and then I get a submission that's like "We here at XYZ widgets are currently focused on quality, service, and low prices." I don't add those.

And there's absolutely no monetization on the website, and never will be. It only takes a few minutes per week to do this.

Point is: please don't worry about enshittification of /now pages. What Akash is doing here is a fun project, and /now pages in general are not going the listicle direction.

I think GP is complaining about a change of topic of /now, not that it becomes corporate SEO gamified.

Agreed. I really like the concept of the now page as a succinct quarterly update. I want it to only change once per quarter.

I also really like consolidated news feeds of one persons activity across all platforms (which seems more like what these "auto now" page attempts are going for).

I think we need a new term. I would like to call it /feed. It could even be implemented as an rss/atom/activitypub aggregate feed of all a user's activity across publishing platforms.

/feed

Let's make it a thing. And let's keep /now as the quarterly update.

(also, your now page link is not resolving)

I'm planning to build this for myself and could make it available for others if there's interest.

You are spot on. Some people intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood what it is

Or just have a different idea about the time frame they think is relevant. Because /now could mean "where are they now" or "what are they doing right now" and both are interesting to different people.

One is position, one is velocity which are distinct and relevant I think

Looks great! My website has a /life page (https://anandchowdhary.com/life) where I track all my life & health data, including:

  - yearly themes and quarterly personal OKRs
  - my live location (yes, really)
  - books I read, music I listen to
  - biomarkers, health and fitness data, sleep records

They are all tracked on GitHub as open source JSON APIs: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/life and built using GitHub Actions.

Cool page! Maybe you can ask some data brokers what interoperability standards they use so you can provide the correct file to them, perhaps even negotiate a good price for the data ;)

Haha indeed... if it helps, I built https://stethoscope.js.org where I used official & unofficial APIs and takeout exports to compile everything in one place.

This looks cool! I'll have to look into it :)

This is really cool! I hope to get to something that looks like this one day. Love how your 'Move in to new house' KPI is at 119%

You've got a pretty awesome website! Is this made using NextJS?

Looks like https://fresh.deno.dev/

Indeed! I redesign my personal website every few years (https://anandchowdhary.com/about/versions) and use a different stack every time.

Haha the OKR progress is also dependent on how far we are in the quarter, so if I do something too quickly, it has the tendency to go above 100%.

For location, I don’t see a pin but see a window centered on an area in Utrecht. Is the centerpoint supposed to be cords of your location?

Cool idea!

I only store the geolocation up to 2 decimal places so it's rounded a little to not expose my precise-precise location, but more of a city-level location (source: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/location/blob/d82432169621...).

I love this! Nice work!

You have an eye for beautiful design

Thank you, kind stranger. :)

This data is super dangerous to reveal. Unless you provide fake data to fool strangers deliberately.

Which parts are dangerous to the average chum with no enemies?

Live location

I don't think knowing what city he's in is particularly dangerous.

He got a new house (likely with new furniture and appliances). Best time to rob the house is when he is in a different city.

Haha that's true. I do only store the geolocation up to 2 decimal places so it's rounded a little, but people do find out when I leave town. Luckily I have camera/alarm systems/etc. but maybe my insurance will tell me I brought this on myself. I even had https://x.com/anandstalker live-tweeting it before Twitter made their API too expensive.

The overwhelming majority of burglars are not doing online reconnaissance to establish where one person might be, when you can just drive by and see if there are cars parked there, or just kick in the door and see if anyone yells.

maybe I do... we'd never know!

> quarterly personal OKRs

Good grief, what happens when you don't meet them? Do you put yourself on a PIP?

I'm curious how folks feel after trying to compile information like this long term. Data is cool, but constantly logging everything you do in discrete chunks is not. Not only the constant demands from every company you interact with to "fill out this short survey" and rank things, but to log every book I read, every calorie I consume, every beer I drink....it's exhausting and I've burned out hard on all of it. Do people actually keep up with this for more than a few months?

I've actually written a tool to track all my "podcasts" (in quotes because it includes long form videos, courses and other things). It brings me incredible joy.

In the same app I can track books I want or that I've read and other things.

I've been doing this for 2 years.

I feel the same way. I find tracking exhausting, because if I’m going to do it I want it to be correct, which takes a lot of effort. In some cases it’s not really possible to be correct, which causes me a great deal of stress if/when I try.

That said, some people are into it. This post from Stephen Wolfram is something I think about often. It’s cool to see, but not something I could ever realistically do. Kind of like the people who take a picture of themselves every day for 20 years.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...

So this is like a finger ~/.plan file, but in HTML.

It's kind of fun to compare the amount of resources used between, say, John Carmack's time at id and this - I would bet this requires several orders of magnitude more compute :)

I recently looked into setting up a finger server on a spare Ubuntu box, but came up with nothing useful.

Admittedly, I didn't look very hard, so if anyone has some pointers, please share.

Not sure if what you implemented was the legacy style of finger or the newer webfinger...but the indieweb community certainly uses (or used to use?) webfinger for discovery. See: https://indieweb.org/WebFinger

No, I'm looking for the old school CLI finger.

  >finger user@example.com

Though I find the new version intriguing.

While I've only done it very few times...whenever i have set up old school things, the challenge is ALWAYS that i end up being alone - with no one to play with said stuff. So, the initial fun always wears off. But, I'm glad that you have undertaken playing around with old school finger, and wish you well and hope you have some good fun! :-)

I always felt like .plan was more of an about page, and .project was the now page.

I would posit that this post is a more useful entry into a /now page than a collection of data from third party services. If I want to follow my friends' interests in a specific area of media (e.g. movies) then I'm inclined to log in to that service and see their recent reviews. I'm not sure an aggregator like this actually provides value to readers. On the other hand, reading about a fun software project about integrating with disparate APIs via custom Go scripts seems like a much more interesting personal site post. I guess I'm just really not sold on the benefits of a /now page.

You bring up some valid points here!

Yes of course someone could log into a service and see what their friend has reviewed recently. That would however require someone to go through the effort of creating an account on each of these services/websites.

I think using those services/websites is great for keeping a general track of what friends are watching, playing, reading, etc, is great, however, it's not orientated around an individual. That's what the now page tries to achieve. Instead of checking a friend's status/logs across multiple sites, you can just find everything on their now page (or more specifically, my now page).

The purpose of this post was just to walk through how it all worked. A lot of this stuff was new for me and I got to learn quite a few things in the process that I then went on to use in other projects so in my eyes, I think working on this was an overall success :)

In case my original comment wasn't clear, I thought your post was cool and interesting. I also use Hugo but had never considered the challenges of automating something like that. I liked the write up a lot.

It was clear :)

Thanks for giving it a read and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I plan on hopefully writing more posts in my free time

But if /now -pages had a standard format you could use an aggregator to gather data from all of your friends /now pages to a single location. =)

Very cool.

I once did something similar using sockets and Cloudflare's Durable Objects. I had my current playing song, workout minutes and git commit count.

It was a bit unreliable when I switched to Apple Music so it's gone away for now.

This has inspired me to make it again.

Thanks.

Your project also sounds interesting. I did think about how I could add/track loads of different things on my site, but given it's a static website, I decided to keep things simple.

Music was a bit tricky to track and the update frequency would have been too high for my site so I just left it out for now. Maybe I'll go back and change that one day in the future if I change my mind.

I update my /now page manually (https://www.jvt.me/now/) and prefer it that way to make it intentional.

For some level of automated updates, I have my README (https://readme.jvt.me or ie https://github.com/jamietanna/jamietanna) that provides a more recent view of things

There's a lot of stuff I track, like podcasts I listen to (https://www.jvt.me/kind/listens/) or number of steps I take (https://www.jvt.me/kind/steps/) but I don't feel like things like that should be on my /now

(I do need to rethink what is on my /now page, tbh)

Nice, took a while to find the actual now page to see.

You should look into why this is being double-scaped:

>Kiki’s Delivery Service

Thanks for spotting that. I do have a function to check for HTML escaping to handle things like this but it seems like I might have missed the check for this. I'll add it in soon.

>Nice, took a while to find the actual now page to see.

I'll try and update the page to make that a bit clearer

A link at the end of the post where you link to the source code would do it - that's where I was when I was tilted into action to check it out anyway

On topic: intriguing idea. I may have to have a look at something like this next time I'm procrastinating doing something else haha

Bonus points for linking to all of your research and discovery, that's super helpful - nice one :)

Noted! I'll add an extra mention of it. I thought I had it covered in the first line of the post but it's probably a good idea to link it again at the end of the post as well

I would highly recommend looking into something like this. I found the whole process really interesting and I used what I learnt on this project in later projects as well.

very nice! My website has a /open-dashboard page (https://www.pankajtanwar.in/open-dashboard) and I'm putting : - workout data - current location - social media metrics - my bike report card (every single expense, performance etc)

This is pretty cool!

How are you tracking workouts/bike stats? Is that manually tracked somewhere or done automatically?

thanks :) mine is manual + some of them, automated. i built a custom telegram bot which periodically/on-demand asks for data points, run basic algos to calculates these stats and push to realtime firebase storage.

I love the idea of a /Now page. I just wished there was a way to make it only accessible to people I care about enough to share these. Or a way to have certain sections private unless you are a close friend for an example.

I still have a /now page, but it follows the 2007 Web 2.0 trend of basically been a stream from audioscrobbler, Flickr, blog etc (or their modern replacements). Life updates are just blog posts

Is it just me, or does a desire to tell the whole world what you're up to every moment feel very ten-years-ago?

I don’t see now pages this way. For me, they have always been about having a personal space in the midst of an increasingly commercial web, where few things are under our control.

While I don’t have a now page myself, I do appreciate the efforts of those who try to decentralize the internet — even if some of their pages might appear mundane to others.

https://akashgoswami.dev/now is a 404

... A for effort?

I should add a re-direct but it's on my personal website here https://akashgoswami.com/now

I've linked the now page in the first line of the post

The .dev site is where I'll be writing more technical posts while my .com site is for everything not tech/coding

https://akashgoswami.com/now/

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