I wrote a scraper for a government agency's announcements — and learned why boring tools win
I wrote a scraper for a government agency's announcements — and learned why boring tools win Every morning at 6 AM, a small Python script on one VPS checks the Indonesian food agency's announcement page. If there's something new, it saves the record to a JSON file. That's the whole job. I built it because I wanted to track food-policy announcements without refreshing a website by hand. It runs…
I created a Python script to monitor announcements from an Indonesian food agency. The script runs on a single VPS and checks the agency's page each morning. If there's new content, it saves the information to a JSON file. This simple setup uses just one VPS, a crontab scheduler, plain JSON files, and static hosting. The decision to keep the tool simple was intentional.
The machine is a single Linux box, the scheduler is cron, and the output is plain files. This approach minimizes complexity and reduces the chance of complex problems. The script is open source, and the author has learned valuable lessons from building a small data tool.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
