Day 3 of the TUI Challenge is about browsing the web in the terminal.

I use to use browsers like lynx or elinks back in the early days of the web when I had a slow connection like dial-up or a wireless modem from the late 1990’s. Back then, web sites were much simpler than today. An advance web site might have tables! So, in those days, a text browser worked well. But, how about now in the era of Web 2.0 or even Web 3.0?

The challenge today is to use a text browser to visit two web sites and summarize them. And then, things got hard.

I was actually trying to use lynx for my daily web usage, and I was looking up how to configure newsboat so I can forward an article via email now and later to add to my task tracker.

The two sites I that I was trying to find the answer on I was trying to look at was reddit and github which gave problems. I think the ’new’ Reddit has a lot of JavaScript which these two text browsers do not support. My solution was to use old.reddit.com which is the classical interface which is closer to Web 1.0.

GitHub was all but useless in my text browsers. It was too hard to get past all the items normally hidden behind js menus. And, after a few page views, it stopped showing me anything from the repos I was trying to visit. I am not sure if the site thought I was an AI scraper and just stopped showing me anything or if there was something else.

In the end, I was able to use old Reddit, Google Groups, and the newsboat web site to figure out what I wanted to do:

bind m article,articlelist pipe-to "neomutt -s\"RSS Article\" me@example.com" -- "Email article"

Daily totals

Score time! Yesterday left us with 55 points. The challenge of doing research on at least two site and summarizing it is worth 20 points. In the bonus points include 5 for filling out a form which I did many times on my search engine page, which gives me 25 points for the day, and a running total of 80 points.