
Show HN: Get a Slack message when your brand is mentioned on HN - zepolen
https://littlebirdie.io/
======
LeonidBugaev
Do not wanna be that guy, but you can do that with Zapier and way more
[https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/675/post-message-slack-
when-...](https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/675/post-message-slack-when-your-
company-name-mentioned-hacker-news/)

We (tyk.io) use Slack notifications with Zapier for various searches on HN,
Reddit, Twitter, Stackoverflow or even Google Alerts (the last one use built-
in Slack `/feed` feature).

~~~
zepolen
Actually Zapier was the reason I made Little Birdie! They had a HN and Reddit
integration that didn't work at all and that motivated me to make my own
solution, also the $600/year was a bit too much for personal use.

~~~
bryanh
You do not need to pay for a Zapier account to do something as simple as HN ->
Slack unless you have hundreds of HN mentions a month.

------
nickstinemates
Have been using [https://www.hnwatcher.com/](https://www.hnwatcher.com/) for
more than 3 years. Love it.

~~~
msravi
Just registered. I seem to be able to add keywords, but can't find a way to
remove keywords or edit the frequency of notifications. I've tried disabling
uMatrix for the site, but that doesn't seem to help. Is it just some weird
config with my browser or is that the way it's meant to be?

------
zepolen
This was made for my own and a friend use, and we found it useful, maybe
others will find it useful too.

------
ngokevin
Mention ([https://web.mention.com/](https://web.mention.com/)) is also another
social mention tracker. I use it for an open source project and would
recommend it.

------
koolba
Free product idea: Same general concept but applied to the _content_ of sites
that make the front page.

In your Bitcoin example, one would be notified if the displayed content of an
article on the front page (or say top N, or greater than M points, ...)
includes the word "Bitcoin".

Bonus points if you can do complex or negative matches. Ex: +database -mongodb

~~~
zepolen
That's an awesome idea - I'll add it to the todo list.

------
ge96
That was my first exposure to webhooks was slack, I see it in a few places now
that triangle circle-corner logo.

I don't know how often the front page of Hacker news is updated but you could
build this yourself.

CRON > PHP > CURL > HTMLDOMScraper > Slack webhook

I had everything else except the CRON part, I had trouble trying to run that.

note: the CRON thing for me, I tried Ubuntu and Debian, I don't know I
couldn't get it to work. I couldn't get a simple php script to execute on the
timed interval.

So a dumb solution would be to use a setTimeout poll with JavaScript and call
the AJAX request to the PHP script which then runs everything else.

------
3pt14159
Just to be clear, the bot doesn't get full read access to all channels, right?
It can just respond back when called or message a pre-setup person or channel?

~~~
zepolen
It requires no read permissions at all to the channels. It receives commands
eg /littlebirdie help - and posts to a channel of your choice via webhook.

------
JofArnold
I love this kind of stuff. Super precise side project that fills a need and is
fun to build.

Slightly related and clearly shameless plug: you could build this from scratch
in about 2 minutes using my our new (or about 30 seconds if you fork an
existing one). If you're interested email automation@jofarnold.com for a
developer account. I'd very much like to hear your feedback.

Obviously not as targeted as OP but still cool :)

------
fridaa
F5Bot[1] is a free alternative that sends an email instead.

[1] [https://f5bot.com](https://f5bot.com)

~~~
stephengillie
For just looking at titles on the front page, here's a one-liner in Powershell
that scrapes every 60 seconds, and emails you:

While ($True) {If ((iwr
[https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com)).content.split('",
') | select-string "YourBrand") {Send-MailMessage -from i@i.com -to
example@example.com -server MySmtpServer.example.com -subject "YourBrand was
mentioned on the front page of HN!"}; Sleep 60}

~~~
codeplea
Does your one-liner continue to send the same email every 60 seconds while
"YourBrand" is on the front page?

~~~
stephengillie
Yes, you may want to disable it when your brand hits the front page.

------
tyingq
Cool. Is there a blog post somewhere that shows how it works internally? I'm
curious if there's some formal named entity recognition, or more basic string
matching. Would it work well, for example, if you had a brand name that was
also a common term?

~~~
zepolen
Nope there is no fancy entity recognition going on here at the moment, though
that would be cool. It's a simple regex of the form

    
    
        '\bterm\b'
    

or in wildcard cases

    
    
        '\bterm.*\b

------
tlrobinson
There's also [https://notify.ly/](https://notify.ly/) which includes "dozens
of sources, like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Blogs, News, Medium &
Product Hunt."

------
guillegette
Another suggestion: Send me the posts in the front page that have more than
100 (or any amount) votes. Or maybe a daily message of yesterdays front page.

Thanks!

~~~
j_s
[https://twitter.com/newsyc100](https://twitter.com/newsyc100)

top 10: [http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-
daily/)

------
marcinkuzminski
This looks nice ! i was missing such thing to search for hacker news mentions
of our company.

------
rrggrr
Would be great if we could select source (eg. not have Reddit)

~~~
zepolen
Added, you can use -source:reddit now.

