The art of crafting and loving your own tools

I have learned one good lesson from tasting someone's else food, it's never salty enough and I always miss the good drink pairing or something else is missing. And I'll feel bad for making any critique or special request.

I have a similar feeling about apps, tools and platforms I don't maintain. Sure i can help fixing them with requests that will likely be forgotten in their backlog. Or I can pick an alternative product which will unfortunately lack features from the former or will have their own ux issues, bugs, weirdness...

In the end I'll flavor ones that focus on simplicity and which provide good documentation and support for data import/export and customizations through their API or through plugins and scripting.

Miniflux, Shaarli, Obsidian, Dropbox, Cloudron....are those kinds of apps and platforms I use that do a thing well yet I have customized to my taste, e.g of such personalizations:

Dropbox is automatically organized based on custom rules, all orchestrated through cron jobs.

Bookmarks in Shaarli are tagged automatically thanks to a plugin I've made available in my shaarli_plugins Git repository.

My apps hosted in Cloudron are restarted automatically on schedule if they stop responding, thanks to some cron jobs and Cloudron's API.

Music I download on-the-go from my mobile phone through Seeker (Soulseek client) is synced automatically to my storage and visible in my Navidrome and Subsonic clients; so I do not need Spotify. It is also orchestrated via cron jobs, using rsync and syncthing.

Notes I take on my Obsidian at work and at home are synced automatically thanks to Syncthing an Git on my personal Gitea server.

Miniflux is the tool I've extended the most as I've blogged in Reading RSS in peace with a few Miniflux Hacks, e.g:

organize the feed categories in Miniflux.

group items by author.

show stats about each feed.

highlight links I've already bookmarked in Shaarli.

add one-click buttons Add to Shaarli / Follow in Miniflux next to each link mentioned in those articles depending if it's some RSS feed or a random link I might want to bookmark in Shaarli.

Some of those recipes are available in my repo.

Email attachments related to our financial activity are archived in our Dropbox and renamed automatically based on their content, using OCR. The whole thing simplifies communication with our accountant and their software.

My monthly invoices are generated automatically from InvoiceNinja and I'm looking at a solution using only Python.

I'm also making my own RSS feeds from sources that lack one like https://indieblog.page/all and https://www.journee-mondiale.com/les-journees-mondiales.htm, I've shared the source code for indieblog and for journee-mondiale, both are orchestrated via cron jobs.

I keep building more, I'm working on my own tools to supplement or replace InvoiceNinja, Shaarli, Wallabag, Obsidian and Miniflux. The fewer apps I rely on, the more focused I become.

Relying on my own recipes, scheduling things though cron jobs and building my own platform saves me costs, improve my computer experience and make me more efficient about problem solving.

It also likely make me a bit lazier and annoying.

You can be more efficient too, and I can help if you like!

The best way to get in touch is via my email morgan at zoemp dot be. You can also follow me on the Fediverse / Mastodon at @sansguidon@mamot.fr. I speak (a lot) French, English and a bit of Dutch.