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Show HN: Serverless Scripting for GitHub, Asana, Airtable, and more
- tyingq 9y agoTrying to understand the concept here. It feels sort of like ifttt or zapier. But different, because the "UI" for creating integrations is spread out on to the 3rd party sites (Github, Airtable, etc)...by injecting the UI with a chrome plugin. As opposed to a central administrative UI. Is that roughly correct? Edit: Ahh, not just background integration, but also a greasemonkey like ability to tweak the 3rd party sites as well, right?
- 33degrees 9y agoSeems mostly like greasemonkey, yeah
- hackerews 9y agoThis is for building add-ons for GitHub, Asana, Trello, Airtable, Pivotal Tracker, and other productivity apps. And they don't break because they cleanly use that app's API. The primary features are meant to make API development much better: - Sign in with X instead of setting up OAuth flows or auth. - Webhooks are built in, so you don't need a server to catch. - API docs autocomplete. No need to dig through them. - It's Serverless. Deploy your add-on on save. It's inspired by Google Apps Script, the platform that powers all Google Docs add-ons. Hence less like Greasemonkey in that it uses real APIs under the hood, and less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 9y ago>less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines Hmm. I'd gotten that impression because of these excerpts from your site: "When someone stars your GitHub repo, automatically send them a thank you email" "Blockspring Scripts makes it easy to sync data, build alerts, reports, integrations, and 'if x then y' workflows for the products you use every day"
- hackerews 9y agoThanks, good point. It's more for use-cases like this: - Build a Mail Merge add-on for Airtable in 2 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahG935eGnb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahG935eGnb4 - Build a Sheets Importer/Exporter for Trello in 60 Seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcD6Qrc3Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcD6Qrc3Ck UPDATE: changed a bit of content on page to reflect this.
- alooPotato 9y agoSeems like you rely on the chrome extension to initiate the script? I.e. for the mail merge from airtable, you figure out which page the users is on to know which table to merge from correct? If so, might I suggest inboxsdk.com for help with your extension dealing with Gmail.
- hackerews 9y agoBig fan of Streak! Thanks for the suggestion. You're right -- since these apps don't (yet) embed our SDK in to their site, we need to get the current state (eg current page, selected table, etc) from the Chrome Extension. But our goal is to provide entire entire extensibility platform in an embeddable JS snippet, so hopefully that won't be the case long.
- alooPotato 9y agoUnfortuantely it might be difficult to convince Google to include your script inside their apps :) Other than our InboxSDK, you could also look into building a gmail addon and having your users install that, but it would be another install in addition to your chrome extension.
- hackerews 9y agoIsn't Gmail enabling Google Apps Script-based add-ons soon (or already)?
- alooPotato 9y agoYes exactly what I was referencing. But users install them independently if your chrome extension.
- orliesaurus 9y agoStarted playing with it, need to find a good use case. Maybe something like: - when a trello card is due send me a message on Facebook to tell me to stop watching memes. - when someone opens an issue on GitHub with a specific keyword send me a slack notification. - when i get an email from someone (like a client) requesting a quote, open a new card in Trello in the prospective clients board Any chance to get LinkedIn support?
- hackerews 9y agoHere's one I really like: https://community.blockspring.com/t/starlet-collector-creates-the-stars-information-in-your-readme-on-github/23 https://community.blockspring.com/t/starlet-collector-create... Click to update all the repo star counts in a README.md, and push a new commit.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hnrodey 9y agoWhat are the security risks of using a tool like this? How do I know that you're not secretly siphoning off the data from these apps?
- andrei_says_ 9y agoI’d like to know this as well. Thank you.
- hackerews 9y agoGood question. You'll need to trust the company behind this, and make sure the scopes they're requesting are reasonable. Similar to any other app you use that asks you to "sign in with x". Luckily here, the company behind this (https://www.blockspring.com https://www.blockspring.com) is used by thousands of businesses, so a safe bet.
- andrei_says_ 9y agoSign in with x usually allows access to my name and email address. Trusting my content is another matter.
- gingerlime 9y agoAny pricing info? couldn't find it on the scripts side, and neither on the main site...
- hackerews 9y agoIt's free for developers. Has a limit on compute time, but most usecases won't run into it.
- holtalanm 9y agoAm I the only one more excited about the built-in slack integration in the browser on that page? https://www.joindowntown.com https://www.joindowntown.com seems really cool.
- hackerews 9y agoAnnoyingly Slack didn't let this get published in their app store. Too similar in functionality to Slack itself.