Bridging and My Time of Late

Lately, I have been writing a lot over on Gadget Wisdom, where I write more tech themed stories, about self-hosting. That isn’t exactly uncommon, it is a popular topic for many people.

But what does that do in relation to my longstanding practice of working on tools for my website? The issue has been that I have tried to create tools that do exactly what I want, how I want it. That can be great, but it discounts a lot of existing tools.

I tried to build some of the tools to create a feed reader, but it never quite got to where I wanted it to be. I’ve built some great features into my website, and I have plenty of ideas on how I could improve them, but they work now, so I’m not rushing on that.

As I keep setting up these hosted services, many of which are good enough for most daily needs, the question I am pivoting to is how I can integrate that into my website and my own code. I still have plenty of projects where I can’t find a project that does what I want, but plenty where I can.

A few ideas I have been batting about.

Add support to my site for posting images from my Immich photo library. I don’t want to expose my entire photo library, but curate it.

Have my site integrate to my self-hosted notification service, Ntfy.

Use FreshRSS to read RSS and Atom feeds, and merge that with other ways of getting information.

Move to hosting my own calendar, so I can integrate that to send specific calendar events and RSVPs to my website.

I’m not sure how many of these I will do, but by bridging services I can install today, I can do more with less time.