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Automated XKCD with /etc/cron.daily/

2022-06-08 | #XKCD | @Acidus

A few months ago, I built a Gemini mirror of XKCD:

XKCD Comics via Gemini

I was manually running a script which would sync the archives. I finally got around to automated this. I was expecting to edit crontab to create a cron job, but Ubuntu makes this easier by just having a /etc/cron.daily/ folder. Any scripts in there will execute automatically once a day. macOS has a similar concept via a /etc/periodic/daily folder.

The net result is my mirror will stay up-to-date, and you can always fetch the latest XKCD comic here:

Latest XKCD

Linux admin work and automation are a bit like working with ffmpeg:

At first it seems opaque and confusing
Then it's pretty easy once you dig in a little
Once you figure it out, you usually just setup a script to do it for you
After you're done, you hardly ever need to touch it again
By the time you do need to create or edit something, you have forgotten how and need start back at step 1