Today's Deep-Dive: Kibitzr

Episode description

Kibitzr is a self-hosted personal web assistant designed to automate repetitive website checking tasks, acting as a ‘secret twin brother’ that monitors data sources and notifies users only when changes occur. Its self-hosted nature is a significant advantage, prioritizing security and privacy by keeping user credentials out of third-party hands, which is crucial for sensitive data like financial information or internal company resources. Kibitzr offers flexibility, running on various operating systems and capable of monitoring resources behind VPNs or within private networks, unlike typical cloud services. The tool is built primarily with Python and is available as Free Open Source Software under an MIT license, boasting an active community on GitHub. Setting up Kibitzr is designed to be straightforward, primarily involving configuration through a human-readable YAML file rather than complex coding, making it accessible even for beginners. For more advanced scenarios, Kibitzr supports powerful features like Selenium for dynamic JavaScript-loaded content, XPath, and CSS selectors for precise data targeting, and can integrate custom scripts. This combination of ease of use, robust functionality, and control makes Kibitzr a compelling solution for automating online tasks without compromising security.

https://kibitzr.github.io/

Kibitzr is a self-hosted personal web assistant designed to automate repetitive web checking tasks, acting as a 'secret twin brother' that notifies users only when specific data changes.
The primary motivation for self-hosting Kibitzr is security and privacy, allowing users to monitor sensitive information like bank balances or internal company servers without entrusting credentials to third-party cloud services.

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