1.6 KiB
Recently-Updated Page Shell Scripts
As soon as ~ford granted me entrance to tilde.Club, I knew that I wanted to keep tabs on what cool things folks were doing there. And thinking back to the mid-90s, what was the best way to know what was new on a site? A recently-updated page! So I set about making one for tilde.club.
There's no question at all that this is a rudimentary hack, but it's the exact sort of hack that was The Way To Do Things on the mid-90s Internet. (Note that that's the mid-90s-capital-I-Internet, not the 21st-century-lowercase-i-internet.) And I'm using tried-and-true command-line Unix filesystem commands to grab, parse, and sort the list of pages, so I feel like I'm treading in the footsteps of thousands before me. The result is the list of all tilde.club pages updated in the last 24 hours, which is generated from the findmod.sh shell script once a minute from a crontab job.
Of course, while the HTML version of the recently-updated list is firmly mid-90s (well, if you view source you'll see that it's 21st-century HTML5, but still), enabling cooler 21st-century functionality required making the same list available in a more easily-parsed format. Enter JSON, and the API version of the recently-updated list, generated by the findmod-json.sh shell script once a minute via crontab as well.
Hope these are useful to someone!
Jason Levine, aka ~delfuego