Another Crazy Project Idea

I am trying to get a new project off the ground. The main objective is to automate some tasks using various services. And since I’m in “learning mode,” this is an excellent opportunity to learn about webhooks and how one can use them to allow events in one system to trigger actions in another.

This blog, for instance, automatically publishes new content to a DigitalOcean App Platform server when I “push” content to the main branch of the git repo where the blog content is managed. And with this mechanism, I can publish content anytime, from anywhere, and, more importantly, from any system as long as I can access the git repo.

Let’s unpack that a bit. Publish from anywhere anytime is, of course, trivial. A laptop with an internet connection solves that, but so do phones and tablets. However, phones and tablets may add a bit of complexity because they often have limited local storage, require different tools, etc. I have set up my “writing” environment to be ultra-mobile and functional across various devices (possible topic for another separate post?).

The “publishing from any system” part is more interesting and goes beyond the simple hardware. With “any system,” I also include creating content using one system and automatically having it be accessible on another. We can take this even further — what about one system automatically generating content and publish to another?

For example, I could have a bot generate content and publish short posts on my blog. Another bot could aggregate data and publish summary statistics. And so on. Oh, and, of course, yet another bot could notify my gazillion fans on the various social meds that a new blog posted has been published. Yes, this example may be contrived, but the concept works, and we can expand it in many directions.

Ok, we may need to add this one to the List 🤓