Show HN: Get a Slack message when your brand is mentioned on HN | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Get a Slack message when your brand is mentioned on HN

littlebirdie.io

132 pointszepolen31 comments

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-...

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).

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.

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.

Haha, yeah -- our (Zapier) reddit integration isn't used too much so it wasn't at the top of our list of improvements. I fixed it a few weeks ago since I too was tired of it not working -- I still run dogetipbot over on reddit so I know a bit about breaking (and fixing) reddit bots. ;)

can you put at least a contact email on that page? looks shady although very useful service (using it already). What are your future plans for it?

Worth noticing that HN API provided by https://hn.algolia.com and Reddit have built-in search API as well.

Not sure how to interpret their pricing plan, but it seems that in Zapier this feature costs money.

Have been using https://www.hnwatcher.com/ for more than 3 years. Love it.

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?

Another vote for HN watcher. Great little service.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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 :)

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

[1] https://f5bot.com

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).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}

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

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

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?

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

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

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!

https://twitter.com/newsyc100

top 10: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

Hacker newsletter is pretty good

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

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

Added, you can use -source:reddit now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com