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