4 ms·

Ask HN: hnnotify.com - useful to any users here?

14 points by alum 17y ago

Howdy, HN. I recently finished up a community college course in RoR (I'm usually a learn-on-my-own type person, but being busy I thought that having assignments, etc. would keep me on track with the learning task) and the beginnings of Hacker News Notify was my final project. I had some time this past weekend, so I finished it up and thought some folks here might find it useful. Hacker News Notify allows you to create a watch list for submissions with particular phrases in the title, submitted from a particular user, or from a particular domain and be notified via email of matches or subscribe to your watch list’s RSS feed. The application scans the "New Links" section of HN (currently) every 15 minutes. It’s definitely not an example of programming genius and I’m sure many here could whip it up in an hour or less, but hopefully some find it handy in some way. Thanks.

alum 17y ago
Link: http://hnnotify.com http://hnnotify.com
adrianwaj 17y ago
adding keywords but the watchlist remains empty. Have you tested? looks good otherwise.
- alum 17y ago
  Yes, tested, registered another new user and keyword just now after reading your comment. Would you try again when you have a minute?
  - adrianwaj 17y ago
    it's fine. You could have the rss link more prominent. Nice work. SearchYC also have rss feeds.
deleted 17y ago
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christonog 17y ago
Very cool, how valuable was the course for you, and was it mostly online? I'm on the fence on whether I should continue with my informal study or bite the bullet and take a structured class.
- alum 17y ago
  The course was completely online and I took it at Sierra College in Roseville, California. I found it to be slow paced, but wanting to get a good grade in the class did force me to make time to learn the material when I could have otherwise used that time to do work-related tasks, etc.
zepolen 17y ago
Good work, though this looks like a perfect job for Yahoo Pipes. For example: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec3e22c92eadf748f http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec... This one filters out stuff like techcrunch/Ask YN, but you can easily make it only allow certain keywords.
- alum 17y ago
  I never doubted that there would be something better and more robust for the task :) This is the first time I've seen Pipes, pretty neat.
aichcon 17y ago
It would also be interesting to be notified when a certain user posts a comment - I have a competitor on this site and want to track his posts :) Nice site!