Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

No one would call crayons and comic books bullshit, because they are artistic mediums where the expression can stand by itself, has the intrinsic value of being expressive.

Yet in CS there are very smart people such as Alan Kay and the Constructivist types such as former-OLPC now-Sugar, all screaming about how we're learning brain-dead languages on machines doing their worst to make it impossible to become useful and literate without a ten year breaking in period until we become journeymen codesmiths. These machines & languages are not trying to help all of us become fluent about what it is that is running: they are there so that those who already know the language and the program can continue advancing it, until it's shippable, at which time it will execute: when we say learn to program, more often than not we mean learn to fit yourself in to that production cycle.

I'm not trying to argue one way or another about the learning to code merits, but it's important not to think of coding as this completed worthwhile thing in the way we do it! OP is an example of systems research to allow us to create agency in systems: that is programming, coding of behaviors, and one who gets good at it has gained a coding literacy. Ditto for spreadsheet wizards!

My point is that we are free to build entirely new forms of literacy both akin and unlike the programming languages we have now, and that the one's we have now are arbitrary. And, judging purely from the size of assumed knowledge passable programmers rely on, I'd contend, as do others, we'd do a lot better at making a literate society with different languages and forms, more tailored to introspection and mirroring their behaviors than towards producing a running application artifact: if we want people to learn systems, make the systems be more about being learnable and meddle-able than about being execution engines. It's our agency we need to see reflected, and IFTTT and OP are great examples of coding where seeing our agency at work at the end is far more of a direct path: it is radically different than how programming today works, in a good, different and fundamentally very important way.

In leaving, I'll point to a perspective on these better machines: these are machines that build agency by way of using APIs of other machines. I'm convinced that machine to machine interface is the key to making programming not suck, not a drain for this planet, for those who would be composers of code. rektide's gentle suggestion- machine to machine systems interfacing is the way to beget human/machine interface.

Honestly, I think math education fulfills that job of code literacy to a great degree. It's good to understand how computers operate and be aware of code, but 'everybody must code' to me always has a subtext of 'I like coding, why don't you?' I personally don't like the endless reinvention of wheels, the omnipresent long variable names, and the widespread language fetishism of coding. I mean, all code runs on top of electronics but I don't think everyone should spend part of every day wielding a soldering iron and I doubt you do either. I think a lot of people prefer coding to electronic engineering because they don't care for burning themselves and sticking wires into their fingertips on a regular basis.

  Most of the time the real stuff isn't easily crawleable without writing a pice of software just for the source.
  But you're right, there should be a possibility to get such apps to work without any code.
  If I wrote a crawler for images from a DA-artist, I didn't want to rewrite it for every other one...

Shameless offtopic plug: that's exactly what we at http://import.io are trying to solve. We're in Developer Preview, check us out!

Please let me know if you have questions. I'm planning to make a screencast tutorial on how to make and link Agents.

I've got a Windows desktop product that does something similar for file activity. The plan is to expand the triggers out to other areas http://www.folderagent.com

Seeing a Haskell project on github (https://github.com/frio/ifrit) that sounds similar under your handle- post the Elixir one! Would love to see some Elixir code in such great project area, whatever the state!!

FWIW at first I thought this thread was about Hugin.

Regardless of the hugin conflict, it'd be nice not to have to spell the name out to people when recommending this. Maybe even something ambitious like just calling it "Tubes"? (I'm not aware of anything else with that name.)

I vote yes. It's one consonant different from an existing application/thing. Having said that I'm terrible with naming things and can't offer any alternatives.

Ah just saw the reason for the name on github. I thought you chose it out of the blue. What about a line from Anchorman: "Great Odin's Raven!" or something to that effect :P

Eh, I had never heard of Hugin before.

Don't try Muninn, it's already taken for something sorta similar: http://code.google.com/p/muninn/

That's a good question. Ultimately, it all comes down to you, but as mentioned by the other commenters, the double ending 'n' (which is uncommon in English, as far as I know) and the fact that there's an established OSS project with a very similar name would make sure that people don't talk about your project as the "Hugin with two n's" or the "Huginn that's not the photography thing." Google will also helpfully redirect queries for "huginn download" to the other project[3], though that's probably because your project doesn't have many links to it yet.

That being said, they're not in a related area, so I doubt anyone would be excessively confused between both, as opposed to say, Go[1] and Go![2].

What I'd do, personally, is try to find another name and only keep the current project name if I can't find a better one that's not already taken. It makes it easier to rank well on Google and is less likely that someone will apt-get the wrong project.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language) [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=huginn+download

Vote for "sepip"

Same here.

It's confusing.

Muninn would seem like appropriate alternative.

This is a great project and will surely help a few people down the road starting their own clone of IFTTT :)

Awesome. Great work. Looking forward to digging in.

Cool. FWIW, I'd use a micro image (or instructions for installing on top of a standard Ubuntu 12.10 image) if it was available.

A Heroku or EC2 build would be amazing

Hosted would also be good though, I think there are a whole class of people who don't care all that much who has access to their data so long as they could self host it (or have someone else host it for them) if the service ever stopped running.

I agree - great looking docs!

Thanks, that is what I was thinking of doing. Maybe even set up a list of the RSS feeds on a simple text / HTML page; then use Huginn to pull the entire list from the URL, combine, sort, remove duplicates and output the HTML. Anytime you wanted to change the list of feeds, you can just edit the HTML page.

I'll have a look ;-)

Will do. P.S. Looks really nice. Good job.