digest bot post

content/blog/2024-01-15-digest-bot.md

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+---
+title: Digest Bot
+description: My mornings start with a bit of reading
+date: 2024-01-15
+tags:
+  - random
+draft: true
+extra:
+  auto_center_images: true
+aliases:
+  - /blog/digest-bot
+---
+
+Each morning, shortly after I've woken up, I receive an email.
+
+<pre style="border-left:2px solid gray;border-radius:0;max-width:100%;overflow-x:scroll;">
+Subject: Your digest for Wednesday, January 03
+From: Digest Bot &lt;redacted@redacted.com&gt;
+
+Good morning, this is your daily digest for Wednesday January 03, 2024.
+
+Daytime weather is expected to be cloudy. 30 percent chance of flurries
+early this morning. Wind becoming southwest 20 km/h this morning. High
+plus 3. UV index 1 or low.
+
+The following new articles have been published recently:
+>> Xe Iaso
+   - New Year's Resolutions
+     URL: https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/new-years-resolutions/
+
+>> John Graham-Cumming
+   - Complete restoration of an IBM "Butterfly" ThinkPad 701c
+     URL: http://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701c.html
+</pre>
+
+Its an email I quite look forward to, sent by a trusty Cron job that's been running for the past few months.
+
+## Why?
+
+I spend a fair bit of time reading other people's blogs. Its where most of the ideas, and nearly 100% of the motivation for this one stem from.
+
+My list of blogs to keep an eye on has grown quite a bit since I started this habit back in 2017. During that time, I've come up with a little list of comments about interacting with blogs via RSS feeds:
+
+- All the RSS apps suck
+  - They either have good sync, or a good UI. Never both
+  - The best ones are either annoyingly expensive, or abandoned
+- Managing a feed of posts to read is hard to get right
+  - Some publishers (*cough, Cloudflare*) drown everyone else out
+  - Few good readers nicely support tags/categories
+- I want to read articles on all my devices, but don't want to maintain a central server
+  - Also, Miniflux just randomly doesn't work sometimes
+
+So, after many years of building half-baked custom readers, and trying everything available on the Play Store, I decided to take an entirely different approach to keeping up with my favorite blogs.
+
+## How the Digest Bot works
+
+Digest Bot is a Python script triggered by a Cron job every morning.
+
+Once triggered, it downloads a copy of the RSS file for each blog I'm "following", and checks for new articles against an SQLite database of previously seen ones.
+
+It then makes a quick query to [weather.gc.ca](https://weather.gc.ca) to get the weather for the day, constructs a plaintext email with the weather and new articles, then logs into my SMTP server and sends me an email.
+
+All subscription management is handled in an SQLite database that I can easily back up and hand-edit if needed.
+
+### Why email?
+
+I'm not quite sure how I got this idea in the first place, but I like basing this service around email for a few reasons:
+
+- I can view these emails on any device I own
+- Links open in the appropriate browsers for each device
+- Even if the server dies, my existing daily digest emails remain in my inbox archive
+- I can very easily move the script around without fiddling with CNAMES or web proxy configs
+- Server uptime is not critical. The script can miss a day, or run late. I don't care
+- I can forward interesting digest emails to other people
+- Previously visited links are automatically marked as read in my email client
+
+## Closing thoughts
+
+*Make little scripts to solve your problems. Its rewarding.*