Comment by iKlsR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iKlsR | Hacker News Reader

I have a slack workspace that has several bots, some listen for specific keywords and or phrases around the web and post to the relevant channels. Other bots remind me if I'm slacking off (maybe stayed a little too long on youtube), remind me of appointments, to drink water, if a stock price falls and some more. Also have filtered rss feeds for business and finance news etc. All of these bots also have custom identities that make it much more engaging like Axelrod is my bot for finance related news.

Others tell me if my server is getting swamped, forward important emails like renewing a cert, a deploy failed, bug in prod or something else that requires often immediate attention. Chat widgets from sites in production also go directly to Slack so I can reply quickly if needed. (Gmail, Sentry, Freshchat, Ploi etc, integrate them all and filter out what's critical).

Everything generally operates on a 15 min interval or so it's not noisy and I've pretty much tuned it to only receiving specific stuff I want to see. Having a central assistant like hub to go to is very useful and time saving.

+1 for having a personal Slack workspace - I think this is an under-appreciated way to host side projects and learn how to develop with Slack. There are so many services which already include Slack integration, you can wire everything up into your personal notification space.

Oh cool, I didn't know if others were doing this. I've recently just started going down this path with some zero effort IFTTT triggers but I'm not happy with how infrequent they seem to trigger. My next step is to build my own set of listeners/scrapers.

I posted the same thing on a similar thread yesterday but if you're looking to build some scrapers and listeners and make it easy for yourself I'd highly recommend Huginn (https://github.com/huginn/huginn). I set it up a few months back and I've been using it to scrape all sorts of info and alert me on things. IE:

* A change in GBP -> NOK exchange rate, to indicate if it's a good time to buy ready for my next trip to Norway.

* Alerts on flight prices to help me purchase flights when they're at their cheapest.

* Daily digest email with content I'm interested in from HN and some web comics.

* A summary of new content coming into my RSS reader.

It works really well for this sort of stuff and I found it fairly easy to get up and running.

I found this last night and I'm already looking at replacing/extending my existing setup with it. Thanks for the share!

Nice! It didn't take me too long to setup with docker-compose on a cheap Digital Ocean instance. I'd suggest reading through all the options and toggles provided by environment variables though. There were quite a few I didn't find for a few weeks which proved to be important or useful and they're not explained in the docs all that well. Aside from that, I've not had any teething issues really.

Thanks for the link! huginn looks cool and useful (good combination!). Impressive work by 179 contributors.

I have had numerous simpler projects automating my digital life but I made the (probable) mistake of always starting from scratch and writing stuff all on my own.

I was in a similar boat but refused to build my own system. Huginn was a perfect solution for me and I really enjoy using it. You can write your own agents if you need to but I haven't had to so far.

Since I set it up a few months ago I've been using it a bunch, it's event driven system is great for when you want to trigger off multiple streams half way through a flow. You can also go back through past events if you want which is really powerful.

I found https://www.scrapingbee.com/ the other day. Checkout their blog as well, filled with useful stuff.

How does you not know if your slacking too long on YouTube? Do you use some chrome extension ?

Rescuetime, https://help.rescuetime.com/article/44-how-to-set-goals-in-r...

Did you build these bots or got them from somewhere?

Some are are custom built from apis but I daresay you can find just about anything to hit a webhook or integrate into slack or elsewhere nowadays. Some examples are https://littlebirdie.io/ I use to filter hackernews, Zapier for RSS & filtering feeds, google calendar etc, nothing complicated, just know what you need from a specific service then figure out a way to get it to yourself in a recurring distraction free manner be it an existing addon or something you can roll yourself.

Wait isn’t having a bot send you notifications all day the opposite of “distraction free”?

Not OP, but I think that the idea is that if a notification makes it through the system, it has been filtered to be worthy of distraction. So, there isn't a cognitive cost to the user of "is the notification worth reading" since it has already been determined to be that way.

You're right. On average I probably get about a dozen spaced out during my working hours, 10am to 4pm. On a busy day I might get a couple dozen but the intervals make these easily manageable and I always have priority. If I see something from Gilfoyle in alerts that's probably more pressing than a company I'm following that just released unaudited financials in news. Setup might sound odd but in reality as said above anything that makes it through has some stake in something I'm invested in and want to keep an eye on.

What does this cost?

Costs me nothing. Some channels eventually reach their lifetime usefulness like a topic I was interested in and amassed some 500+ mentions of it on twitter, business news from 8 months ago about someone getting acquired etc. I can export the messages and delete the channel to avoid history archival. Only real cost would be the one or two times a year maintenance and improving bits and pieces every now and then.

I think the better question is how long did it take you to set this up initially?

Right, I started with RSS initially. It wasn't in one go, it was over a period. If I had to give you a definitive answer however, I haven't spent more than a couple hours total on this and I've been using this close to 2 years now. Did a recap last night and I have a total of 17 bots, some post daily, others I see once a month. I'm also seeing tools being shared here that could make this a lot easier as well such as huginn.

There’s no subscription charges or hosting costs?

None whatsoever. Other than my server which is unrelated (because the same service could run locally) where I have a twitter bot that listens for "save this" from my main account and will unroll a thread and format it nicely for reading later. See https://threadsja.com/ThreadsJa/1214555011289690112 for an example. Used to be personal but I wiped it, got a domain and other people are slowly starting to use it.

So about every service I have connected to it is on a free tier except Ploi (free as well) but I need for actual work and is also too good not to pay for.

would love to talk to you more about how you set this up

You can see the discussions under my main comment. Pretty much just make a slack workspace and start finding integrations for services you use. Zapier for one makes it super easy to filter out what can get to you from these but I'm seeing good things about https://github.com/huginn/huginn now.

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