The /now page is a concept from Derek Sivers — a page that answers the question “what are you focused on right now?” It’s like an about page, but current. Thousands of personal sites have one.

I wanted one too, but I didn’t want to manually update it. So I built it to update itself.

How it works

My site is built with Astro and deployed as a static site via GitHub Pages. Astro runs all page logic at build time, which means you can fetch() an API inside a .astro file and the result gets baked into the HTML — no client-side JavaScript, no backend.

The GitHub API is public for any user’s activity. No auth token needed. So the /now page just fetches my recent push events at build time and renders them:

const res = await fetch('https://api.github.com/users/korbonits/events/public?per_page=100');
const events = await res.json();

const pushedRepos = [...new Map(
  events
    .filter(e => e.type === 'PushEvent')
    .map(e => [e.repo.name, { name: e.repo.name, url: `https://github.com/${e.repo.name}`, date: new Date(e.created_at) }])
).values()].slice(0, 5);

The Map deduplicates by repo name so you see each repo once, ordered by most recent push.

Making it actually stay current

A static site only updates when it rebuilds. If I only rebuild on push, the “now” page would only be as fresh as my last blog post — which defeats the purpose.

The fix is a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow. One line added to deploy.yml:

on:
  push:
    branches: [master]
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 6 * * *'  # daily at 6am UTC

Now the site rebuilds every morning at 6am UTC regardless of whether I’ve pushed anything. The /now page always reflects the last 30 days of GitHub activity.

The SSL gotcha

One thing that tripped me up locally: fetch failed with unable to get local issuer certificate. This is a corporate SSL inspection issue — my machine has a custom CA that Node doesn’t trust by default.

The fix for local dev is just an env var:

NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 npm run dev

This doesn’t affect production builds running in GitHub Actions, where the cert issue doesn’t exist.

Adding Goodreads

GitHub activity is a good start but a /now page is really about more than code. I’ve been tracking my reading on Goodreads since 2016, and it turns out their RSS feeds still work even though the API is officially deprecated. Each shelf has a public feed at:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/<user_id>?shelf=currently-reading

Same pattern as GitHub — fetch at build time, parse the response, render it. The only wrinkle is that Goodreads wraps some fields in CDATA tags, so titles come back looking like <![CDATA[The Mind Illuminated]]>. A quick regex strips them:

const xml = await res.text();
const items = xml.match(/<item>([\s\S]*?)<\/item>/g) ?? [];
const books = items.slice(0, 5).map(item => ({
  title: (item.match(/<title>([\s\S]*?)<\/title>/)?.[1] ?? '').replace(/<!\[CDATA\[([\s\S]*?)\]\]>/, '$1'),
  author: (item.match(/<author_name>([\s\S]*?)<\/author_name>/)?.[1] ?? '').replace(/<!\[CDATA\[([\s\S]*?)\]\]>/, '$1'),
  url: (item.match(/<link>([\s\S]*?)<\/link>/)?.[1] ?? '').replace(/<!\[CDATA\[([\s\S]*?)\]\]>/, '$1'),
}));

Both fetches run in parallel with Promise.all, so there’s no added latency at build time. The page now shows what I’m coding and what I’m reading, updated every morning automatically.

The manual section

Not everything has an API. Where I am, what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about — that stuff needs to be written. I added a src/content/now.md file with a simple frontmatter schema:

---
location: Seattle, WA
working_on: Migrating my blog from Jekyll to Astro and building out new personal projects.
thinking_about: How generative AI is changing the craft of software engineering, and what skills will matter most in five years.
---

Astro’s content collections pick it up at build time just like blog posts. The page renders it at the top — location, what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about — and the automated sections follow below. This is the part I’ll actually edit occasionally. The rest updates itself.

Getting listed

nownownow.com is Derek Sivers’ directory of now pages. Once your page is live, you can submit it there. Mine is at korbonits.com/now — go check it out, and if you want to build your own, everything above is all you need.