azblogfilter - Azure Blog Filter

Description

Fetch and filter Azure blog posts (announcements and updates) based off of interests.

Why? Because I am interested in getting Azure news, but the cloud is a big (and noisy) place. I only want the news I care about most.

Installation

You can get the binary from the latest release.

Otherwise, if you want to run from trunk you could git clone this repo and make install.

If you are a systemd user, you can install a systemd unit and timer to routinely check for blog updates by running make install-systemd.

Usage

azblogfilter filters blog posts either by a cached value (good for the usage of "what are the new blog posts that have been published since I last checked?" This is the mechanism used in the systemd service). Or it can use --since to go back in the past for blog posts without using cache. The --since parameter takes a systemd time span (man 7 systemd.time). E.g. to get all blog posts in the past 3 days you could specify --since -3d.

Filter posts by keywords and categories.
You can also specify the time filter by using
a built-in caching mechanism or by specifying
the time manually

Examples:
	Get all blog posts in the past 7 days.

	$ azblogfilter --since -7d

	Get all blog posts since last run that have
	Kubernetes or Linux in the title.

	$ azblogfilter --cache --keywords "kubernetes,linux"

	Get all blog posts that have Linux in the title or
	have the DevOps category.

	$ azblogfilter --cache --keywords linux --categories devops

Usage:
  azblogfilter [flags]

Flags:
      --cache                   use cached value
      --cache-location string   location for cache (default "~/.azblogfilter")
  -c, --categories string       categories filter (case insensitive)
      --config string           config file (default is $HOME/.azblogfilter.yaml)
  -h, --help                    help for azblogfilter
  -k, --keywords string         keywords filter (case insensitive)
  -o, --output string           output format, json or csv (default "json")
  -s, --since string            filter post with systemd time (man 7 systemd.time)
  -v, --version                 get version

Config

azblogfilter uses a config-based filtering mechanism. The config file (optional) is located at ~/.azblogfilter.yaml. It should be a list of keywords and categories.

Keywords filter the Azure blog entries by title. Categories filter the blog entries by category/tag. Here is a sample config:

keywords:
  - linux
  - kubernetes
  - postgres
  - github
  - devops
  - repo
  - pipeline
  - container
  - storage
  - blob
  - virtual machine
  - aks

categories:
  - devops
  - developer
  - announcements

Notifications

I use dunstify for notifications. If you run make install-notify it will place this script in a path location. It is used, for me, from a systemd unit to notify if there is a new blog entry.

Development

Create a release

1. Add changes to ./CHANGELOG.md.
2. Change the version in ./cmd/version.go (leave LOCAL, just change the major.minor.build part).
3. Push to upstream: git add . && git commit -m "commit message" && git push origin master.
4. Run make release to create the git tag.
5. Push to upstream: git push --tags origin master.