webology, 2 months ago

@simon I wrote a startpage browser extension that uses HTMx to fetch a new page from @djangonews and display it.

Since switching to Vivaldi, I haven't figured out how to make it work though. Otherwise, I would have released it by now.

The basic idea is htmx fetching from a Django view and displaying it.

kfdm, 2 months ago

@webology @simon Oh, I quite like that idea! Is there a reason you bundled it as an extension instead of just being a regular page ?

webology, 2 months ago

@kfdm @simon It's actually both which is what makes writing a browser extension with HTMx so nice.

I have a page that rendered the news using the same template that ships with the extension. It's kind of meta, but it looks good when you don't have an internet connection and it swaps the right things out to keep it updated.

Here's a preview.

kfdm, 2 months ago

@webology @simon Does building it as an extension help with load/render speed ? Does it keep things in cache better ? I guess if you had some personal APIs it might make it easier to keep the credentials logged in or something

I quite like the idea of https://momentumdash.com but customized with my own queries, but thought an extension would be more annoying to maintain and less automatable to re-install on each update 🤔

webology, 2 months ago

@kfdm @simon I'm not sure. I wrote mine ~4 years ago and it seemed like the right thing to try at the time.

In my mind, it might be nice to get always updated info when a new Python/Django library drops or make sharing easier if someone wants it.

bitprophet, 2 months ago

@simon It's currently a nascent landing page for my custom search service (normally accessed via browser urlbar default search setting).

At the moment that means it's just a rubric reminding me what slugs/prefixes are available for searches like py pathlib (stdlib), pp invoke (pypi), crate typed-builder (lib.rs/crates.io), etc etc. With links to the relevant index pages, for fun.

Hoping to build in stuff like a DDG search field & so on, eventually.

ehmatthes, 2 months ago

@simon I've been meaning to write a personal dashboard page for a decade now.

bitprophet, 2 months ago

@ehmatthes @simon Let's bring back the original late 90s homepages like what Yahoo! and co used to be. Give me that sweet weather, news stories, newly crawled links, etc!

simon, 2 months ago

I've been using this mechanism all year and it's been fantastic https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/daily-planner

heracles, 2 months ago

@simon What's the benefit of Github issues over working in plain text locally? Curious if there are any computational paths this enables.

simon, 2 months ago

@heracles mainly linking: I can drop in links to other issues and PRs and I get tasks that automatically check themselves off when I close the related issue

Plus I can drop in screenshots and code snippets really easily

And everything is reliably backed up for me, and accessible across both my phone and laptop

I still use Apple notes a lot as well

laimis, 2 months ago

@simon ok, this seems very promising and something that I would find very useful. Thanks for sharing, will give this a test drive!

laimis, 2 months ago

@simon booo, just tried this and failed at github pages part. Github requires a paid plan to have your private repos have github pages. Only public repos get pages under free plan it seems.

simon, 2 months ago

@laimis That's sad. Do private repos on free plans get any GitHub Actions minutes? If so you could do the same trick but publish to Vercel or Netlify instead of GitHub Pages