We (tyk.io) use Slack notifications with Zapier for various searches on HN, Reddit, Twitter, Stackoverflow or even Google Alerts (the last one use built-in Slack `/feed` feature).
Actually Zapier was the reason I made Little Birdie! They had a HN and Reddit integration that didn't work at all and that motivated me to make my own solution, also the $600/year was a bit too much for personal use.
Haha, yeah -- our (Zapier) reddit integration isn't used too much so it wasn't at the top of our list of improvements. I fixed it a few weeks ago since I too was tired of it not working -- I still run dogetipbot over on reddit so I know a bit about breaking (and fixing) reddit bots. ;)
Just registered. I seem to be able to add keywords, but can't find a way to remove keywords or edit the frequency of notifications. I've tried disabling uMatrix for the site, but that doesn't seem to help. Is it just some weird config with my browser or is that the way it's meant to be?
Free product idea: Same general concept but applied to the content of sites that make the front page.
In your Bitcoin example, one would be notified if the displayed content of an article on the front page (or say top N, or greater than M points, ...) includes the word "Bitcoin".
Bonus points if you can do complex or negative matches. Ex: +database -mongodb
I had everything else except the CRON part, I had trouble trying to run that.
note: the CRON thing for me, I tried Ubuntu and Debian, I don't know I couldn't get it to work. I couldn't get a simple php script to execute on the timed interval.
So a dumb solution would be to use a setTimeout poll with JavaScript and call the AJAX request to the PHP script which then runs everything else.
Just to be clear, the bot doesn't get full read access to all channels, right? It can just respond back when called or message a pre-setup person or channel?
It requires no read permissions at all to the channels. It receives commands eg /littlebirdie help - and posts to a channel of your choice via webhook.
I love this kind of stuff. Super precise side project that fills a need and is fun to build.
Slightly related and clearly shameless plug: you could build this from scratch in about 2 minutes using my our new (or about 30 seconds if you fork an existing one). If you're interested email automation@jofarnold.com for a developer account. I'd very much like to hear your feedback.
For just looking at titles on the front page, here's a one-liner in Powershell that scrapes every 60 seconds, and emails you:
While ($True) {If ((iwr https://news.ycombinator.com).content.split('", ') | select-string "YourBrand") {Send-MailMessage -from i@i.com -to example@example.com -server MySmtpServer.example.com -subject "YourBrand was mentioned on the front page of HN!"}; Sleep 60}
Cool. Is there a blog post somewhere that shows how it works internally? I'm curious if there's some formal named entity recognition, or more basic string matching. Would it work well, for example, if you had a brand name that was also a common term?
Another suggestion: Send me the posts in the front page that have more than 100 (or any amount) votes. Or maybe a daily message of yesterdays front page.
We (tyk.io) use Slack notifications with Zapier for various searches on HN, Reddit, Twitter, Stackoverflow or even Google Alerts (the last one use built-in Slack `/feed` feature).