Tux Machines

How We Make Daily Summaries

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 31, 2023,

updated Dec 31, 2023

Hammer And Wrench

THIS site's Git repository is accessible via Gemini, but some newer programs and scripts aren't there yet. One of them helps list the latest articles in Techrights every day after midnight. The program takes as a command line argument an image URL and the second argument is its verbal description. It's processing both, then calling the back end's Perl scripts or Bash wrappers thereof: (there is a similar script for Techrights as well)

IMAGE=$1

ALT=$2

clear

tm-scale-and-process-image.pl $IMAGE | sed 's|""|'\""${ALT}"\"'|g'

echo "<h4>Updated This Past Day</h4><ol>"

tr-generate-feed.pl -d $(date -d yesterday +'%F') \

-x | grep -A 1 $(date -d yesterday +'%Y/%m/%d/') \

| sed -z -e 's/<dd> <\/dd>/ <h4>New<\/h4> /g' \

-e 's/--/ <h4>New<\/h4> /g' \

-e 's/<dl>/<h4>Updated This Past Day<\/h4><ol>/g' \

-e 's/<dt/<li><h5/g' \

-e 's/<\/dt>/<\/h5>/g' \

-e 's/<dd/<blockquote/g' \

-e 's/<\/dd>/<\/blockquote><\/li>/g' \

-e 's/\/n\/202/\http:\/\/techrights.org\/n\/202/g'

echo

echo '---------------------------'

echo

echo Today in Techrights

echo Some of the latest articles

tm-add-entry-sql.pl -a 'Roy Schestowitz' --skip-date --skip-slug -t 'Today in Techrights'

update-and-refresh-from-db.sh

It could of course be done more cleanly and elegantly, but this does the job in less than a second and is only used once a day, so optimisations are not a priority at this time.

In case it's not obvious, we've been running this site from the command line over SSH. Programs with interactive interfaces are presented. They're easy to extend and improve, unlike bloated graphical/Web UIs with plenty of dependencies. █