[ericyd]

I would posit that this post is a more useful entry into a /now page than a collection of data from third party services. If I want to follow my friends' interests in a specific area of media (e.g. movies) then I'm inclined to log in to that service and see their recent reviews. I'm not sure an aggregator like this actually provides value to readers. On the other hand, reading about a fun software project about integrating with disparate APIs via custom Go scripts seems like a much more interesting personal site post. I guess I'm just really not sold on the benefits of a /now page.

[akashgoswami]

You bring up some valid points here!

Yes of course someone could log into a service and see what their friend has reviewed recently. That would however require someone to go through the effort of creating an account on each of these services/websites.

I think using those services/websites is great for keeping a general track of what friends are watching, playing, reading, etc, is great, however, it's not orientated around an individual. That's what the now page tries to achieve. Instead of checking a friend's status/logs across multiple sites, you can just find everything on their now page (or more specifically, my now page).

The purpose of this post was just to walk through how it all worked. A lot of this stuff was new for me and I got to learn quite a few things in the process that I then went on to use in other projects so in my eyes, I think working on this was an overall success :)

[ericyd]

In case my original comment wasn't clear, I thought your post was cool and interesting. I also use Hugo but had never considered the challenges of automating something like that. I liked the write up a lot.

[akashgoswami]

It was clear :)

Thanks for giving it a read and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I plan on hopefully writing more posts in my free time

[theshrike79]

But if /now -pages had a standard format you could use an aggregator to gather data from all of your friends /now pages to a single location. =)