Ask HN: What do you use tools like IFTTT or Zapier for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use tools like IFTTT or Zapier for?

122 pointsthewarpaint54 comments

Also, what integrations do you wish you could use?

About six months ago I came across Huginn [1] for the third or fourth time and finally decided to give it a shot. I've absolutely loved it so far! The docs aren't always great for each agent, but I've never struggled for too long before figuring it out. I'm currently using it for:

* Scraping HN search for new appearances of projects I work on, and immedietely alerting me via email.

* Checking the frontpage of HN for topics I'm interested in, and adding it into my daily digest email.

* Pulling in Commit Strip and XKCD comics when they're posted and adding them to my daily digest email.

* Sending me a notification in the morning if it's going to rain.

* Giving me and my friends the cheapest flight price for a group holiday we're planning. It scans google flights daily so we can watch it tick down over time and decide when to buy.

* Sending me notifications if there's a significant drop in the currency for the country we're going to so I can purchase some at the best price.

* Adding the names of people who RSVP to my wedding into my daily digest email so I can keep a pulse on the final guest list.

Hopefully I'll get a few more ideas from this thread as well!

[1] Huginn - https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Great tip, will definitely check it out!

I have a Zapier hook that filters donation projects from donorschoose.org (food related needs from low-income schools) and sends it to my email address.

Example:

Title: Yummy Yummy in Our Tummies

School: Jeanne Meadows Elementary School

City: San Jose

State: California (North)

Cost to complete: 248.48

Link: https://www.donorschoose.org/project/yummy-yummy-in-our-tumm...

Description: I teach at a Title I school in East San Jose. A majority of my students are first-generation Americans with hardworking immigrant parents. Seventy percent of the students at my school are

Thank you very much for bringing this site to my (and other HN'ers) attention.

It looks like your comment got cut off mid-sentence. I would like to read more about what you were talking about. (And apologies if it didn't get cut off and it was just an issue of my reading skills not fully kicking in :))

Oh, sorry! That was a cut off description from the example email I get sent.

I use IFTTT with a project of mine[0] to track hotel and flight prices in a spreadsheet and get suggestions on places to go.

[0]: https://monitoro.xyz

I like that. Could you tell more? Which site/api are you using to monitor the prices? Feel free to plug your site!

Thanks!

I have a few destinations I'm interested in and some others that I take regularly. I'm watching the respective airlines' own websites for specific searches, and gather the prices in a spreadsheet that I review every time I feel wanderlust.

Regarding the integration with IFTTT, I wrote about it here: https://blog.monitoro.xyz/post/190023685811/monitor-website-...

When I had the original Pebble, I set up an IFTTT notification when the outside temp got above 80 to remind me to go outside and enjoy it.

I'd do that but make it below 80

Between 65 and 80.

80 outside? I would put a pot of stew out there to cook for a few hours.

Nothing like waking up in the morning to find it's still 85, and only gong to get 20-25 degrees warmer as the day goes on. Welcome to Texas. (And yeah, I get that you probably use those insanely crude metric degrees that are too coarse for use by a thermostat...)

I always pick Zapier for automation these days, even for production-level projects. Before that I once searched across several other alternatives and came across Tray.io for my project but they seemed to be very expensive and also had less integrations compared to the likes of Zapier, with no free trial.

I'm not sure why anyone would choose them over Zapier for the prices they were offering but perhaps that's the reason why I wasn't surprised why many developers and businesses keep choosing either Zapier or IFTTT.

I forget if it was IFTTT or something else I set up that downloads any YouTube videos I like/upvote into a cloud sync directory for me.

I may write some custom code to extend this to just youtube-dl anything that appears in my youtube history and store it on my NAS.

I’ll probably self-host huginn and have it periodically put downloaded things (eg offline maps, torrented music via rss) into a syncthing directory (that syncs to all my workstations).

I use Zapier to automatically invest monthly savings (our bank has an API and Zapier integration). Didn't come up with this myself, but here's how it works:

https://medium.com/@petervandoorn92/how-i-automated-investin...

Pro tip - We moved most of our automated processes (business and peronal ones) from Zapier to Integromat which is not only more powerful but also more generous in its free tier.

https://www.integromat.com/

I don’t often comment recommending companies but Integromat is awesome. Their support is also fantastic.

The only thing I don’t like much is that there is no easy way to export stuff you insert in their databases.

I don't use Zapier because of money. I use IFTTT to:

* Keep a spreadsheet of my written tweets.

* Keep a spreadsheet of my liked tweets.

* Used to download Instagram photos liked by me, but Instagram API broke it.

* Keep a text file of my hn, reddit comments, in two separate files.

Why do any of that?

Just another copy of my data. Yes, we can download too from each website; but that requires active action; this happens instantly and on its own.

This is pretty much the same basic use case I’ve had for Zapier at work. My team uses it to write leads into both a Google sheet and Salesforce. The sheet sort of acts as a sanity check and a log of all the attempted lead creations. For one reason or another, they don’t always make it into Salesforce.

Not exactly the same, but only saves tweets with links. I built http://www.tweetd.com to auto generate a link blog from the links I tweet. I use it to keep/search my bookmarks.

Yeah, you can use Zapier for that, but you haven't mentioned anything that couldn't be done just as easily with curl and a shell script... I don't have anything against Zapier, in fact I have a good friend (a dietician) who build a bunch of Zaps to semi-automate her business, a good call for someone who has zero interest in coding. It just seems to me that anyone reading HN might find it easier to not use Zapier or IFTT...

Well, for me, it was never curl or shell vs Zapier or IFTTT. Only time I have used curl is few years ago in PHP while fetching some external link or page. The closest to shell script is my bunch of .bat files or even less number of .vba files I used very few times in life. I never touched linux or *nix if you don't count using Control Panel on PHP Hostings & using Android.

Also, the Ask HN was what do you use these for, not what do you use these for which can't be done by shell?

> anyone reading HN might find it easier to not use Zapier or IFTT.

Well,there you go, I find IFTTT easier than shell or curl because of all GUI & inter-connectivity. Although last two years I go to Google Apps Script first for anything related.

Company uses it to sync client jiras to our internal jira so PMs and the like don't need multiple logins.

I personally do not use either. The less tech and notifications in my life the better.

If Donal Trump tweets something that has word "Turkey" then I immediatly get notified. If it is something negative I sell my Turkish Liras and buy Euro.

Nice protip

Is that working well?

You should get access to Trump's Foundation, I bet their scraper can detect it before he posts it ;)

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-mystery-of-the-t...

Ps. It's an award winning author and more proof is being found ;)

Watch out for that Thanksgiving or Christmas false alert!

Yeah, I have panicked for a moment that day.

Working around silly proprietary features. Eg watching for changes to Alexa’s shopping list and copying the item to a list in a proper todo app.

I use it to get notified for specific keywords in some RSS feeds, and I get notified over Facebook Messenger when my alarm system is enabled / disabled (no control of it through Messenger)

I also use it to trigger IFTTT from some local system events via webhooks and curl (ie: my server finished downloading something)

I use IFTTT to log various events on my home automation ecosystem to Google sheets. For example , each member in my household has their own unlock code for the zwave doorlock. So when any one of us unlocks the door, it will note the person's name and time the door was unlocked.

Automating business processes such as archiving incoming invoices or sharing blog posts on LinkedIn.

I use Zapier to watch the Twitter feed of a conference I go to (NationJS). They announce stuff there first, and update their website much later. Oh, and it only happens twice a year, so I find out about it when it happens, without having to go to twitter.

Have been using Jogly and sometimes Zapier to notify us of actions happening with payloads being posted or form submissions across our sites - pretty simple use cases and have both x-www-form-urlencoded and JSON coming in to same endpoints.

Business processes which are repeatable, time consuming and not possible to do with native integrations between tools (or when native integrations just don't exist)

I watch some running race registration sites with Zapier and when it tells me that they are open I go register immediately so I can have a low bib number.

I use Zapier (free plan) to post to the Facebook page associated to my side project.

I tried to do that through FB's Graph API and failed miserably. Too much red tape

I've used Zapier to prototype a few APIs (Webhook -> Service), and IFTTT for presence detection (Using Wyze cameras as presence sensors).

I only use IFTTT for one, dull use case - take documents from my favourite RSS feeds and add them to Pocket to read later.

I've used IFTTT to make a backup of my internet activity, especially images shared across social media profiles.

Is IFTTT the new Excel ala "if people are using an Excel sheet, turn it into a SaaS"?

IFTTT is already a SaaS, not sure exactly what you mean.

IFTTT is indeed a SaaS but I would also classify it as a general purpose tool like Excel. A jack of all trades. Definitely a master of none. Would you use IFTTT or Pingdom to check your site is up?

If people are setting up IFTTT for business critical things, then potentially there is scope for a dedicated SaaS to some of those things.

I use it to control my LIFX bulb from Twitch chat and from my stream deck. https://www.samjarman.co.nz/blog/lifx-twitch. No programming required but a technical brain helped :)

I use it to publish the RSS feed of my blog to Twitter.

when a bug is created on GitHub, create a trello card

I use ifttt for monitoring reddit hobby aftermarkets

I post into various telegram channels using IFTTT

I built http://pagepoller.r14.railsrumble.com it scrapes web pages and emails if some specific part changes. I use it to get top HN story, xkcd and when free books are available on packtpub.

I'm building a competing product over at https://puump.com which can post RSS feeds (automation is still in the works, so its manual for now)

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