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---
title: "File Hoard Timeline Experiment"
date: 2020-08-10T21:20:13-05:00
draft: true
---
If you are like me, you download dumps of strange data archives. I have old ebooks, internet zines, saved web pages, and more that I have saved to my computer for my later usage. This is what I do rather than bookmark an article or video, I’ll manually save it (see my last post on how things do not last very long on the internet). There is a problem with this: it is not very nice to browse huge folders, usually you will check just the first few things. Another problem: even though all of these I’ve downloaded provide me with more content to enjoy than I ever could have time to, I spend almost no time at all enjoying them. Rather, I’d just open up some social network feed (reddit, twitter, hacker news) that does the hard work of curating for me (by telling me what to look at now, and more things will show up later).
So what is a solution? A local web server that randomly will suggest things for me to check out from my hard drive, and displays them in a timeline format mimicking these popular websites. Instead of opening a link to a website when you click on an item, it runs an OS command to open it in your default application (so audio files open in VLC for me). It works great for me, rather than browsing a social media site, I can check out the content that I decided was interesting enough to save for later. Right now, it does need a few more features. Namely, authentication (so someone doesn’t send a bunch of requests that open a ton of documents on your computer) and filtering (so huge dumps can be ignored). The random algorithm could also be improved, by comparing access times to created times to find obscure files you have never even opened. Overall, it is an interesting project that helps move away from algorithmic and hyper fast content that I find is toxic to my attention span and mental well being. While it is a simple program at the moment, it has a lot of potential for future features.
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