the commonplace notebook for eliana

ideas to use github actions for

2 min read

1. Automated Content Updates

Since you’re building a digital garden, you can use Actions to pull in data from other places so you don’t have to manually edit files.

  • RSS/Newsletter Feed: Automatically grab your latest newsletter or blog posts and inject them into your Quartz index.md.
  • Readwise Sync: You can set up a script that runs every night at 3 AM to download your latest Readwise highlights and save them as Markdown files directly into your content/ folder.
  • Spotify Integration: Show what you’re currently listening to on your homepage by having an Action fetch your “Recently Played” every hour.

2. Image & Asset Management

Terminals are often used for bulk processing images (resizing, converting to WebP). Actions can handle this:

  • Auto-Compression: Every time you upload a large .jpg to your repo, an Action can automatically shrink it and convert it to a web-optimized format to make your site load faster.
  • Social Images: You can have an Action that automatically generates those “preview cards” (Open Graph images) for your notes using the title of your Markdown file.

3. Web Scraping & Data Collection

You can treat GitHub as a database.

  • Price Tracking: Have a script run once a day to check the price of an item you want. If it drops, the Action can send you a notification or even commit the new price to a CSV file in your repo.
  • Symbol Cataloging: Since you’ve worked on symbol scrapers before, an Action could run weekly to check for new Unicode symbols and update your symbols.txt automatically without you ever opening iTerm2.

4. “Self-Healing” & Cleanup

  • Broken Link Checker: An Action can crawl your Quartz site every week and email you a list of any broken links (404s) it finds.
  • Stale Content: It can automatically add a “Last Updated” timestamp to the top of your notes based on the git history.

5. Notifications & Personal Assistant

  • Email/Discord Alerts: If a specific person forks your repo or someone opens an issue, Actions can send a message to your Discord or email.
  • Scheduled Reminders: You can use a “Cron job” (a scheduled trigger) to remind you to update specific logs or clean up your “To-Do” folder in Quartz every Monday morning.

The “No-Terminal” Workflow

By combining github.dev (the . shortcut) with Actions, you have a 100% GUI-based workflow:

  1. Edit in the browser.
  2. Commit with a button.
  3. Actions builds and deploys.
  4. Site updates.

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