As a reminder of how shitty those social media can be, I'm feeling obligated to write this short rant.
This morning, using my secondary empty and idle Instagram account to do some research, I end up discovering a nice content through the home page feed, and I'm trying to share it with my partner.
For some reason, the share does not reach my partner, so I want to find the content again and I navigate backward and this triggers a home feed refresh. My home feed is now completely unrecognizable and this causes immense frustration.
Last week, I was about to revive my main Instagram account, and this kind of bad UX reminds me that the benefits are not worth the immense frustration and non-sense of navigating an endless loop of evaporating content. No, Meta, you won't fool me again.
I'm addicted to Changedetection for spying on website changes and internet search results for specific keywords, Occasionally also for monitoring price changes. It's quite handy to discover new links added to web directories, or stay updated with some websites that do not provide any RSS feed.
Context
I'm watching hundred of URLs.
I often spy on webrings and blogrolls to discover new interesting links, and also on search engines results for specific keywords.
I'm self-hosting Changedetection through Cloudron.
I'm mostly following through those watches via my RSS Reader, Miniflux.
For some specific changes, like weather bad conditions, I subscribe via ntfy.
Anyway, I've developed a few habits that fit my workflow so well for every new watch, which are:
Settings > General
This is where we set defaults for all future watches, it's pretty obvious you must start here. Here is my current setting:
Time between check: By forcing a convenient interval between checks, you try to find a balance between information overload and staying current. Pick your poison, but don't hesitate to override this setting at per-watch level.
Extract from document and use as watch title: it's convenient to let Changedetection take care of naming your watches based on the webpage titles rather than leaving the sometimes very long and non human-friendly URL as a default description.
Random jitter: this is handy to avoid stressing your I/O too much.
General > Group tag
This one is mostly for better organizing stuff, as I mentioned I follow those changes through RSS, I noticed it was harder to distinct between important and less important stuff because I was following the default RSS feed, but Changedetection provides distinct RSS feeds per groups/tabs of watches, and that's my preferred workflow now.
I'm trying to always set a label, I have around 15 in total, some for specific interests (privacy, discovery aka list of links, devops, music, ...) or specific people, locations and business updates. The rest is generally less important and is labelled with things like FOMO, misc, ...
Those group tags appear as labels next to the URLs you are watching.
If you want to watch a whole group through RSS, link is at the bottom right of the page on the group tab.
Filters & Triggers > Remove elements
It's common on bloated rich web pages to want to focus on specific parts, like everything between <header> and <footer> sections, so I sometimes have to add footer and header. It's mostly needed for sites like eBay, 2ememain, where we can buy and sell things.
Filters & Triggers > default filter and triggers
This is purely for spam reduction as I mostly want to know when something new is made.
Sometimes I also enable Sort text alphabetically depending how the page is updated by its author.
🆕 Those new settings have been added recently and I'm also enabling them on new watches:
Extension
Try the web browser extension for Chromium based browsers, it makes watches one-click away.
Next
I've opened a discussion in Changedetection's repository to talk about how repetitive it feels to me, in the hope we can see something like template settings be proposed in the future, at least for the filters & triggers which I consider is not too hard to start with.
I deal with computers, hence I want things to work the most boring and reliable way possible, with automation, procedures, scripts, not through magic.
Hence, while I love tools such as Atuin, I've a problem with their slogan "Making your shell magical" and generally speaking with any product using such selling argument, especially AILLM-based products.
For this reason, I'm usually against any kind of black box and one-for-everything tools and platforms that want to ease our lives by hiding the complexities. I think that the only result we get out of those abstractions is complexity, pain, and a culture of incompetence and dependability. I mean, if you want to deal with technology, at least you should understand it.
In the end, it's not all magic [1][2], but it can feel magic for sure once we lack understanding. Magic feels shiny and appealing after all, its antonyms say it all.
At work, there exist an onboarding procedure targeted towards new developers in the team, and this procedure relies on scripts which were left untouched for way too long. The bad things : the procedure is broken but nobody dares to fix it, instead the old timers in the team share dirty hacks and workarounds with the newcomers.
Once you face such problem, the only solution is to address the root causes, not the symptoms. I choose to take a look at the procedure, run it again and again after each attempted improvement, cut it piece by piece, shred or rewrite what seems unreliable and suspicious.
Magic exists, but I’ve never seen any in software. Problems are logical. Nothing is impossible. You can solve this problem.1
As a software engineer, please don't fix symptoms. Don't get too used to deal with crap and unsolved problems. Don't be lazy, don't accept the status quo, make the hard work to understand and solve the problems. Set your focus on understanding things deeper. Enhance your and everyone's knowledge. Be a firefighter against ignorance, and help educate your peers to be better at understanding why things work or doesn't.
Sometimes, especially at night, I can't help but I feel the need to hunt down a topic and explore any link in my way til I reach an answer or a dead end.
Sometimes I publish those findings in Shaarli.
This time it was about researching a minimalist tool for blogging, something like bashblog or mkws.
It's not always a victory. Maybe next time. After a good rest.
I'm following Joy of Tech comic via RSS in Miniflux but the image was never loading.
I found half a solution on this blog post of Jan-Lukas Else, unfortunately the proposed solution fails probably as a consequence of some changes in the format of Joy of Tech pages.
The fix is quite simple actually. Edit the feed settings, set the scraper rules to the following:
p.Maintext > img[src$=".png"]
And of course enable "Fetch original content" in the feed options.
