Post: Wiring my web
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title: 'Wiring my web'
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kind: article
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created_at: Thursday Apr 2016 17:37:00 BST
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tags:
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- APIs
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- Web
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- Automation
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- IFTTT
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I'm a nut for automating repetetive tasks, so I was dead pleased a few years ago when I discovered that [IFTTT](https://ifttt.com) let me plug different bits of the web together. I now use it for tasks such as:
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- Syndicating blog posts to social media
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- Creating scheduled/repeating todo items from a Google Calendar
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- Making a note to revisit an article I've starred in Feedly
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I'd probably only be half-joking if I said that I spend more time automating things than I save not having to do said things manually. Thankfully it's also a great opportunity to learn, and recently I've been thinking about reimplementing some of my IFTTT workflows myself to get to grips with how it all works.
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![XKCD: automation](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/automation.png)
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There are some interesting open source projects designed to offer a lot of this functionality, such as [Huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn), but I decided to go for a simpler option for two reasons:
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1. I want to spend my time learning about the APIs of the services I use and how to wire them together, rather than learning how to use another big framework; and
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2. I only have a small Amazon EC2 server to pay with and a heavy Ruby on Rails app like Huginn (plus web server) needs more memory than I have.
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Instead I've gone old-school with a little collection of individual scripts to do particular jobs. I'm using the built-in scheduling functionality of systemd, which is already part of a modern Linux operating system, to get them to run periodically. It also means I can vary the language I use to write each one depending on the needs of the job at hand and what I want to learn/feel like at the time. Currently it's all done in Python, but I want to have a go at Lisp sometime, and there are some interesting new languages like Go and Julia that I'd like to get my teeth into as well.
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You can see my code on github as it develops: <https://github.com/jezcope/web-plumbing>. Comments and contributions are welcome (if not expected) and let me know if you find any of the code useful.
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