Consistency for Progressive Automation

April 5th, 2014
automation, future, tech
I'm a pretty consistent person. If I do something in a particular way and it works out, I'll keep doing it that way. One way this has worked out well for me is allowing easier automation. For example, when I started keeping my calendar I would put lines on my webpage like this:
   <tr>
     <td>Saturday<td> March<td> 18
     <td><a href="http://www.thursdaycontra.com/ThirdSaturday.html">
       Glenside</a> contra
     <td>8:00
     <td><a href="contras/glenside/directions.html">
       Glenside</a>
When I decided I wanted to make an .ical feed, three years later, it was just a matter of writing a script to process this data. It was in a nice consistent format, so this wasn't too bad. Later this let me add first a script to add schedule entries on the command line, and then later another to let me add entries from my phone.

Similarly, I initially wrote my blog posts as one long html page. When I wanted to add an rss feed, I wrote a script to parse the posts, and I had been consistent enough in how I made them that the script wasn't too difficult. Later when a single page became too unwieldy and I wanted to have pages for individual posts, the rss processing code was already there to do most of the work.

This has been a good pattern for me: when I create things on the computer I'm very consistent, which works well if I end up trying to manipulate the data programmatically later. Not everything ends up as input to something else [1] but it's really helpful when it does.


[1] Or at least not everything has yet...

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Body Language For Trans People

When I first came out as trans, resources for trans people were full of advice about body language.

via Thing of Things June 2, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)