--- title: New Media link: https://harper.blog/2025/01/12/new-media/ source: harper-blog published: 2025-01-13T01:59:59Z updated: 2025-01-13T01:59:59Z first_seen: 2026-09-27T19:29:15.293681927Z authors: - Harper Reed summary: 'tl;dr: I added a media section to my website to track and display what I’m reading, listening to, and bookmarking online through automated data collection. visit it here Recently I spent a few hours hanging out with my friends Claude, Aider, and ChatGPT and added a media section to this site. I really enjoy AI-aided development (maybe a post for later). The media section has a log of all my books read (tracked from Goodreads), my recently saved tracks (tracked from Spotify), and my links (tracked from feedbin/netnewsreader). I started posting my links a month or so ago. I wanted to see how the workflow felt. I think it is important for these types of things to just work, without a lot of BS or additional interactions from me. After a month or so, it was fun to see the links that I was saving show up on the site. Like magic. Sufjan Stevens, Leica Q, 7/17/2016 Why Track? I did this partially cuz I miss my websites of the past where I manically tracked everything. It was so much fun to see a daily log of everything I consumed and participated in. However, time passed and everything kind of fell apart (mostly my crons). The other reason I did this was inspired by my friend Simon and his project dog sheep beta. I wanted a robust way to track a bunch of data and save it. I thought about just putting it in sqlite and stuffing it away in a corner of my GitHub to forget about. That is boring tho. I want to force all y’all to see it all in its glory. Instead of SQLite, I ended up making just a handful of scripts that grab the entities, drop them as YAML files and generate entries for my Hugo blog. The result is ultimately the same - but now I get both the data and the posts. I love this cuz I can see my media consumption, force you to see it, and store this for later! RSS Feeds You can check out the feeds for the individual sections quite easily: Full Media RSS Books RSS Music RSS Links RSS I use NetNewsWire, and feedbin and it works great. Highly Recommended them. I will post most about RSS at a later date! Simple Tools Are Better Tools I love hacking on Hugo. It’s fun and super limited. I find the best things are those with fewer options. I don’t want to have to deal with unlimited optionality and magic - just a bit of magic. With Hugo, I can just jam a bunch of markdown into a folder with proper front matter, and then it kind of just works. Beautiful. YOU IN THE CORNER! If you want to do something like this yourself, I would recommend checking out micro.blog. It’s awesome and can do similar things. The new micro.one service is a good, cheap way to get started. New Media My very serious office, unknown camera, 11/8/2012 Unrelated to anything: When I worked in politics years and years ago, the generalized term for tech folks, etc., was “new media.” I always found it funny because from my perspective it wasn’t new, it was media. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me' content: extracted html: 2025-01-13-new-media.html preview: file: 2025-01-13-new-media.preview-041762669984.webp width: 256 height: 256 color: '#606457' images: - source: https://harper.blog/2025/01/12/new-media/L1060869_hu_70ef46bcc5bdabf6.jpeg original: file: 2025-01-13-new-media.image-04a0b7b83e0d.jpg width: 1200 height: 1200 color: '#040706' - source: https://harper.blog/2025/01/12/new-media/L1060869_hu_91c8085aa1d455bb.jpeg original: file: 2025-01-13-new-media.image-59bc39e0bbe0.jpg width: 768 height: 768 color: '#040706' - source: https://harper.blog/2025/01/12/new-media/harper-politics.jpeg original: file: 2025-01-13-new-media.image-140743e01533.jpg width: 720 height: 501 color: '#a9a7a5' --- *tl;dr: I added a media section to my website to track and display what I’m reading, listening to, and bookmarking online through automated data collection. visit it [here](https://harper.blog/media/)* Recently I spent a few hours hanging out with my friends Claude, Aider, and ChatGPT and added a [media section](https://harper.blog/media/) to this site. I really enjoy AI-aided development (maybe a post for later). The media section has a log of all my books [read](https://harper.blog/media/books) (tracked from Goodreads), my recently saved [tracks](https://harper.blog/media/music) (tracked from Spotify), and my [links](https://harper.blog/media/links) (tracked from feedbin/netnewsreader). I started posting my links a month or so ago. I wanted to see how the workflow felt. I think it is important for these types of things to just work, without a lot of BS or additional interactions from me. After a month or so, it was fun to see the links that I was saving show up on the site. Like magic. ![New Media](https://harper.blog/2025/01/12/new-media/L1060869_hu_91c8085aa1d455bb.jpeg)\ Sufjan Stevens, Leica Q, 7/17/2016 ## Why Track? I did this partially cuz I miss my websites of the past where I manically tracked everything. It was so much fun to see a daily log of everything I consumed and participated in. However, time passed and everything kind of fell apart (mostly my crons). The other reason I did this was inspired by my friend Simon and his project [dog sheep beta](https://github.com/dogsheep/dogsheep-beta). I wanted a robust way to track a bunch of data and save it. I thought about just putting it in sqlite and stuffing it away in a corner of my GitHub to forget about. That is boring tho. I want to force all y’all to see it all in its glory. Instead of SQLite, I ended up making just a handful of scripts that grab the entities, drop them as YAML files and generate entries for my Hugo blog. The result is ultimately the same - but now I get both the data and the posts. I love this cuz I can see my media consumption, force you to see it, and store this for later! You can check out the feeds for the individual sections quite easily: - [Full Media RSS](https://harper.blog/media/index.xml) - [Books RSS](https://harper.blog/media/books/index.xml) - [Music RSS](https://harper.blog/media/music/index.xml) - [Links RSS](https://harper.blog/media/links/index.xml) I use [NetNewsWire](https://netnewswire.com/), and [feedbin](https://feedbin.com) and it works great. Highly Recommended them. I will post most about RSS at a later date! ## Simple Tools Are Better Tools I love hacking on Hugo. It’s fun and super limited. I find the best things are those with fewer options. I don’t want to have to deal with unlimited optionality and magic - just a bit of magic. With Hugo, I can just jam a bunch of markdown into a folder with proper front matter, and then it kind of just works. Beautiful. ### YOU IN THE CORNER! If you want to do something like this yourself, I would recommend checking out [micro.blog](https://micro.blog). It’s awesome and can do similar things. The new [micro.one](https://micro.one) service is a good, cheap way to get started. ![New Media](https://harper.blog/2025/01/12/new-media/harper-politics.jpeg)\ My very serious office, unknown camera, 11/8/2012 Unrelated to anything: When I worked in politics years and years ago, the generalized term for tech folks, etc., was “new media.” I always found it funny because from my perspective it wasn’t new, it was media.