Blog idea generator fixes, and a Raspberry Pi plant-care project
A day spent debugging a Discord-based blog idea generator and pushing a multi-phase Raspberry Pi plant monitoring system forward through several build phases.
Personal project day, split between two things.
Blog idea generator. This tool pings a Discord channel daily with blog topic ideas relevant to my interests. Today involved chasing down a couple of bugs: one where the generated ideas came back as a string instead of parsing as JSON, and later one where the Discord webhook failed because an embed exceeded Discord’s size limit — turned out to be caused by a message accidentally routing to the wrong channel. Fixed both and committed.
Beyond bug fixes, I steered the idea generator toward more general topics with real search volume and competition, rather than narrow ideas that felt too automated to explain confidently myself. I also added a database backend to store generated ideas, so there are no repeats and there’s a foundation for a management interface later. Seeded it with a few starter ideas around tmux for remote sessions, using a spreadsheet as a CMS backend, and when to choose GitHub Actions over cron jobs.
Also started looking into setting up n8n in a new project directory, resources permitting.
Plantasia. This is a Raspberry Pi-based plant care monitoring system, built out in phases per a written spec. Today covered a good chunk of ground: ran phases 2 through 7, including fixing a setup script that had written files to the wrong directory (a stale working-directory assumption), setting up a private GitHub remote, and adjusting habits to commit and push more proactively as the project progresses. Ran into a snag with systemd not being found when following the README’s environment setup steps, worked through it, and clarified along the way that no separate repo clone was needed since work was already happening directly on the Pi. Also reviewed and committed a phase covering a self-authoring log and insights feature, and got the plant list configured: a dragon tree and persian shield in the dining room, a fiddle leaf fig in the living room.