onfocus by Paul Bausch

Pinboard Popular Tweets

I use the bookmarking service Pinboard and I'm a fan of its Popular Bookmarks page. A lot of interesting stuff surfaces there. However, the page isn't exactly information rich. Here's a screenshot of the page this morning:

I circled all the instances where the popular link title is simply Twitter. I wanted to be able to know what those links were without visiting Twitter so I whipped up a little Greasemonkey (aka Tampermonkey in Chrome) script to embed the tweets in the page. The script is on Github here: pinpoptweets.js. (I'll leave installation as a fun exercise for you, reader.)

Now when I visit that page I see many, many embedded tweets:

Nov 10^th, 2016, 8:07 am · 3 comments

Ford 350

Nov 7^th, 2016, 1:30 pm

Untitled

Nov 7^th, 2016, 1:17 pm

Amazon Feed Generator Reborn

Today I fired up a new version of the Amazon Feed Generator. It creates an RSS feed from Amazon search results so you can subscribe to them. That way you'll be alerted to new products that show up in those results.

This feed generator is one of the tools that used to live at this site. I put the original together around the time I wrote Amazon Hacks. The feed generator eventually became unnecessary because during the RSS boom of the mid-to-late 2000s, Amazon embraced feeds and offered them for many of their pages. These days they've scaled the feeds they offer way back and I still think it's handy to able to subscribe to them.

The feeds this tool generates are very simple. Each feed entry has the product name, a big image, and the new (non-used) price for the item. For example, there probably aren't too many new Bob Dylan albums coming out on vinyl, but why not subscribe to this feed just to be sure. There are a few more examples on the feed generator page.

Amazon's API has changed quite a bit over the years. My server development environment changed. Let's face it, we've all changed. So to get this running again I built it anew. I used node.js and a couple of existing packages: amazon-product-api and rss. (Those rely on other packages, which use others, and it's packages all the way down.) Thanks for sharing your code everyone! I put the code for this on Github, so you too can run your own feed generator and tweak it if you want.

There are probably bugs and I have a to-do list for things I want to clean up. So let me know if you spot something off. I'm happy another little piece of onfocus infrastructure is up and running again.

Nov 7^th, 2016, 8:54 am

Danse Macabre by Portland Cello Project

Last night Portland Cello Project played here in Corvallis and I got to hear them play Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens. Even with Halloween over it feels like the perfect soundtrack to the world right now.

The Awl recently had a great article about this song: What’s Spookier Than Saint-Saëns's 'Danse Macabre'? That opening dissonant tritone sounds like the devil. Hopefully playing and hearing that diabolus in musica has exorcised some of the evil in the world and we can get to a new soundtrack soon.

Nov 6^th, 2016, 9:45 am