I recently released blogNag which is a Python script I run once per day via a cron job to notify me how long it has been (in days or hours) since I last wrote a post on this blog. This forces me to think “Hmm, I should write another post…”, thus promoting a cycle of continuous blogging.
I remember back around 2000 so some bloggers had this idea to “bug” each other if they didn’t post for a while. This is the modern day version of that, since most of the 2000 bloggers have stopped long ago. ;p
It uses feedparser and I remember having some issues getting that installed in the past so I set up a virtualenv for Python. I had these two links for notes: venv — Creation of virtual environments and How to Set Up a Virtual Environment in Python – And Why It’s Useful
My short version for setting up a venv since I will probably forget by the time I need to do it again…
mkdir blogNag
python3 -m venv ./blogNag
cd blogNag
./bin/pip3 install feedparser
# now we can run
./bin/python3 ./blogNag.py
Look, I’m not great at Python but It Works For Me.
Also, this is on Codeberg because I don’t plan on putting any of my personal work on GitHub in the future if I can avoid it. (Microsoft acquired GitHub and I prefer not to support them if possible. Others can make their own choices in the matter, and I won’t judge!)
You’ll probably want to change the code to look for your own feed and do your own notification thing… Again, it works for me, YMMV and all that. Enjoy!