4 ms·

A few things. My favourite is a flow to pull HTML-formatted newsletters out of my email and push them to Wallabag. I then use Wallabag's RSS feature with Cali

A few things. My favourite is a flow to pull HTML-formatted newsletters out of my email and push them to Wallabag. I then use Wallabag's RSS feature with Calibre to turn them into an ebook I can read on my Kindle. My other major use case is centralized notifications. For a lot of things (e.g. backups), I have a webhooks in Huginn that then push out a notification via Gotify to my phone. I've also used Huginn to scrub/clean up RSS feeds, since it can pull the feed, apply transforms to it, and then republish it.

gettodachoppa 3y ago
This sounds fine but what is this doing that a bash script + cronjob doesn't? Isn't all of this functionality available in CLI tools (and in fact you're likely already using them, e.g. making calibre convert the HTML newsletter to .mobi). I ask because I'm also curious what I can use these sort of tools for. I installed Node Red before and other than visual smart home automation, was at a loss of ideas. As someone who can write bash scripts (and nowadays ChatGPT does all the scripting for me), how can they make my life easier?
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  I think you're underestimating the effort involved in writing something to poll an IMAP folder, checking for new emails, pull the right mime attachments, etc, etc, and then turning around and post them to the right place. Yeah I could write some Ruby or Python or Perl to do the job but I can also spend way less time and use something like Huginn to do it for me. Honestly, your argument could apply to virtually anything you might do with something like Zapier or equivalent. Nothing they do can't be done via scripting. The point is these tools simplify the grunt work so you can go from idea to implementation much faster, with proven code that you don't have to write and maintain yourself.

4 ms·

A few things. My favourite is a flow to pull HTML-formatted newsletters out of my email and push them to Wallabag. I then use Wallabag's RSS feature with Cali

by BaseballPhysics 3y ago

gettodachoppa 3y ago
This sounds fine but what is this doing that a bash script + cronjob doesn't? Isn't all of this functionality available in CLI tools (and in fact you're likely already using them, e.g. making calibre convert the HTML newsletter to .mobi). I ask because I'm also curious what I can use these sort of tools for. I installed Node Red before and other than visual smart home automation, was at a loss of ideas. As someone who can write bash scripts (and nowadays ChatGPT does all the scripting for me), how can they make my life easier?
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  I think you're underestimating the effort involved in writing something to poll an IMAP folder, checking for new emails, pull the right mime attachments, etc, etc, and then turning around and post them to the right place. Yeah I could write some Ruby or Python or Perl to do the job but I can also spend way less time and use something like Huginn to do it for me. Honestly, your argument could apply to virtually anything you might do with something like Zapier or equivalent. Nothing they do can't be done via scripting. The point is these tools simplify the grunt work so you can go from idea to implementation much faster, with proven code that you don't have to write and maintain yourself.