HN Explorer

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

14 points by alum ↗ HN
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.

11 comments

[ 13.8 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] thread
adrianwaj
adding keywords but the watchlist remains empty. Have you tested?

looks good otherwise.

alum
Yes, tested, registered another new user and keyword just now after reading your comment. Would you try again when you have a minute?
adrianwaj
it's fine. You could have the rss link more prominent. Nice work.

SearchYC also have rss feeds.

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

For example: 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
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
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!