I love RSS; I literally couldn’t do my self-appointed job without it. But when it comes to temporarily monitoring topics, RSS feeds are a bit unwieldy; you have to add another layer of workflow to add/remove feeds, set up reminders for yourself, etc. All that has hitherto discouraged me from using RSS when there was […]
What’s Going on With Dick York’s Wikipedia Page?
Wikipedia Hot Topics has handed me a mystery. The site takes one of Wikipedia’s daily top 1000 article lists and reorganizes it by recent increases in page views (as opposed to overall page views). The reordered list provides an overview from Wikipedia, page view information, links to date-bounded Google News searches for the page’s most-visited […]
VibesMasto Gets an Overhaul and a Web Version
Saturday I dug out the VibesMasto News Monitor so I could monitor news about the protests around the country. It was very useful but it also made me cringe. I first made this tool about two years ago when I knew a lot less about JavaScript, and its code is CRUSTY. Uncrusting it became yesterday’s […]
My Dream RSS Reader is Working WAY Too Well
In late November I put together a homebrew RSS reader to address some of my challenges in trying to keep up with thousands of RSS feeds. I knew at the time that I wasn’t going to immediately get a sense of how well it worked because we were heading into the December holidays. I’d have […]
Keep An Eye on the Fediverse With the Mastodon Hashtag Monitor
Over 15 years ago I wrote a book called Information Trapping. It was about how to set up online monitors to find online information around certain keywords and keep it coming as a flow to you via tools like RSS, page monitors, etc. As you might imagine, Information Trapping’s resources and tool listings are very […]
Adding a Date Mode to My Google Alerts Replacement
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you may remember me talking about the idea of persistent metadata. By “persistent metadata,” I mean that every thing in a physical universe can be identified by WHERE they are and WHEN they are. A person is born here, educated here, works here, moved here, died […]
“Barbie’s Dream Google Alerts”
I’ve spent today, around my visit to Granny, making “Barbie’s Dream Alerts” with Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. 😂 (No, I’m not going to call them that. I’m going to call them Calishat Snaps.) There’s some functionality I’ve always missed in Google Alerts that I decided I wanted in my version, so my […]
Gossip Machine As An Information Trap
Hot diggity! I made my first Web monitoring tool! If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve heard me talk about Gossip Machine. At its core, Gossip Machine analyzes a Wikipedia article’s page views over a given time period and identifies days with unusually high page views. The idea is that audience attention […]