Vibecoding a Monthly Saved Article Digest
I save articles I want to read later by sharing them to a Todoist project called “read-later”. I’ve used Instapaper and Pocket in the past, but this is simpliest and works best for me. I also don’t need to pay for any additional services; I can just use my premium Todoist account. I don’t love to read articles on my phone and I really don’t like to read articles on my desktop computer. I tried a system to send a digest of articles to my Kindle when I was using Instapaper, but this always felt clunky and my Kindle was just too slow to really make this a usable experience. In reality, I really just want to read these things on paper.
The simpliest solution here is to just find the article I want to read and send it to my printer. But that’s no fun…so instead, I’m making a goal to vibecode a script that will grab my unread articles from my Todoist project, package them into a magazine or newspaper-like format, and send that digest to my door each month. I’ve looked around very briefly online and have never been able to a service that could provide this - and I overall get why. Creating a custom physical newsletter that gets physically mailed out to one person isn’t terribly scalable. But that’s okay. I’m not trying to scale. I just want to solve a problem of my own and test out whether I - a person attempted to learn to code multiple times in a previous life - can pull this off with the help of LLMs between now and the end of the year.
The way I see it, there are a couple of main steps:
- Access articles: Grab articles from my read-later Todoist project in Todoist via the Todoist API.
- Combine content: Open each link and copy the content of each article into a combined and formatted PDF. I would love this to be nicely formatted with dual column pages, etc., but for now, and getting all of the content in one place will be a challenge enough. I already know I’m going to need to figure out how to deal with any sites that require a login.
- Print: Automatically send the document to be printed to a printing service and have it sent to my door. Surely there will be challenges with billing and payment, but those are for future me. Right now, its just the fun planning!
- Schedule: Schedule the task to run each month and only include articles that have not already been included in a previous digest.
I already spend some time talking with ChatGPT about the concept and we seem to have a basic blueprint in place. BUT, when I tried to install python, I didnt have homebrew installed yet. And when I tried to install homebrew, I didn’t have enough space on my machine…so we’re starting from the ground level here, folks!
More to come.