The more time I spend with Nextcloud, the better it gets.

I Write Scripts

I’m a huge Field Notes guy. I’ve been buying them since their debut because I was following really great blogs back then. Remember that? Blogs? Really great ones that shared really cool stuff? I remember it. It was awesome. Anyway, what carrying a little notebook taught me was that I can’t remember everything. Having kids really drove that home. I live in little lists because I can’t remember stuff. And this extends to data and all things computer.

If I have something administrative to do on a computer, I find a way to do it on the command line and then I script it. Why? Because remembering the name of my script is a lot easier than remembering 100 commands and their critical sequencing. So this blog? I write it with a text editor and then process it with Jekyll. Then I rsync it to a webserver. Do you think that I sit there and type all of this out every time? Do you think that I use a GUI to move files and…all of that? What? No. Not at all. I got it to work a couple of times and then banged out a script to do what I needed doing.

That’s the beauty of computers: if there’s something repetitious that needs doing, there’s a way to make that easier on a bit box.

Dashboards

Back in the day, I used to build dashboards. I wrote scripts that would assemble all of the bad-ass webcomics I used to read and list all of the most recent blog posts from the RSS feeds of the things that I followed. It was great! It got me in the habit of hitting my personal webserver for my daily stuff and things.

After the smartphone entered the world, a lot of that moved to widgets. The phone tried to be my dashboard. For things like my calendar and weather, it did a noble job. But for other stuff? Things that are fiddly or require some kind of parsing? Not so great.

Back to shell scripts. Lots of them. Scripts to grab the weather. Scripts to grab a single Bluesky status post from the local parks department. Scripts to check on RSS activities. All of those things run from the command line and made into neat little lists just for me. But I could only grab that when I was on my computer or could SSH to it.

Nextcloud!

I don’t know why I did it, but I started to poke at Nextcloud’s widgets. Maybe it was because I hated the default dashboard screen. I don’t care what files have changed. That’s not how I work. I sync a lot of stuff all day long so I don’t need that. Status? What? No one cares. Calendar? Well, now that I’m using Nextcloud as my calendar, maybe that’s not so bad. But what about my badass scripts that do cool stuff? Well…

It turns out that you can make your own widgets and it’s not that tough. If you have a grip on PHP and some javascript, you can knock one out really quickly. It’s not even awful to get them installed!

I built one out that runs my daily dashboard and now I can see it on any device localized as if I were sitting at home. That’s pretty powerful. Especially since it all sits inside of Nextcloud.

So What?

Look, the Nextcloud All-In-One docker container is updated by the community on a regular basis. It keeps bugs tamped down and the security up to snuff. If you run it locally and use wireguard to get to it, it’s a pretty waterproof solution. I really dig it. If you start building out your own widgets for it, it becomes more and more useful. It’s more than just cloud storage after that. It’s a place to keep contacts, calendar, and all of your notes, etc. It’s a place to grab RSS feeds and make a curated homepage like in the days of yore. If you want to stop scrolling perpetually, this is your way out.

It’s certainly my way out.

I’m going to build out a tutorial kinda thing for building widgets for Nextcloud. It’s going to take a minute, but when I get it up, I might actually publicize it for the first time. I really want to be a Nextcloud cheerleader. It’s great stuff and the more people who step away from the corporate cloud, the better.