Posts about Web

I created a little ReloaderJS script that I use with a couple projects. Upon applying the script, the page is always reloaded and up-to-date any time I switch to the tab or wake the laptop.

The script allows reloading at a period that matches the schedule at which the underlying site is updated. It also doesn’t bother updating when the site is unavailable (down or the client is offline).

It really stands out now when I see a site that’s tried to reload but couldn’t, so it’s showing an error page from the browser when I open my laptop. It feels good to have solved that problem for myself.

We can find ourselves thinking, "Where did we used to get our news before Twitter and Facebook?" I know where I got news: Google Reader, but Google shut it down, and eventually gave us a taste of aggregated news in Google Assistant on our phones, but it never really allows us to consciously control it.

Social media’s a bit of a mess and mostly getting worse, so you might want an alternative. Google Reader was based on RSS and Atom news feeds from all your favorite websites, and those still exist.

I still read my carefully curated news feeds using Feedly as a successor to Google Reader. I have hundreds of different news feeds aggregated into this one place (kind of like Facebook and Twitter), but it’s a much more controlled stream of news about which I care. Anyone can create an account at Feedly and get started by searching for a handful of sites you’d like to read regularly. Over time, you can extend and finely tune your feed of news.

If Feedly isn’t quite your style, you can find other news readers, and allow yourself to stay informed without necessarily needing to scroll through all the noise of Facebook and Twitter.