

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thanks.
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christonog
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.

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alum
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.

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zepolen
Good work, though this looks like a perfect job for Yahoo Pipes.

For example:
[http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec3e22c92eadf748f)

This one filters out stuff like techcrunch/Ask YN, but you can easily make it
only allow certain keywords.

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alum
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.

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alum
Link: <http://hnnotify.com>

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aichcon
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!

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adrianwaj
adding keywords but the watchlist remains empty. Have you tested?

looks good otherwise.

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alum
Yes, tested, registered another new user and keyword just now after reading
your comment. Would you try again when you have a minute?

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adrianwaj
it's fine. You could have the rss link more prominent. Nice work.

SearchYC also have rss feeds.

