Simon WillisonFeb 3, 2023

Ported my @covidsewage bot over to Mastodon

Every morning it posts an image with the latest Covid sewage charts for various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area - because the sewage charts are the only figures I still trust!

The sewage doesn't lie

The screenshots come from https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater - here's the latest image:

Show threadPaul GessingerFeb 3, 2023
@simon @covidsewage
Doesn’t GitHub Actions stop running scheduled jobs after some (short) amount of time without activity on the repo?
Show threadSimon WillisonFeb 3, 2023
@pagessin @covidsewage not if you commit a change back to the repo every time the action runs!
Show threadPaul Gessinger
@simon @covidsewage I might be wrong but I believe that’s what I did and they ignored those commits. I suppose if you do it with your personal SSH key it might work.
Feb 3, 2023 at 11:30amWeb
Show threadSimon WillisonFeb 3, 2023
@pagessin I've been doing it for 100+ repos for a few years now without running into that problem, see https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/
Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository

Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it. Update …

Simon Willison’s Weblog
Show threadPaul GessingerFeb 3, 2023
@simon well fair enough 😅