Use case
I was looking for a way to be notified - almost instantly and with some kind of reading queue - of new items published on my favorite sites. It could not be via email since I hate piling up emails: it makes me feel over with TODO stuff since I use my Inbox GTD-style.
My solution
I assembled tools I already had/knew to fulfill my need:
- Get the RSS feed URL for your favorite websites (for example Hacker News): http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
- Use this feed as an input in IFTT. IFTT is a great free online service that lets you connect parts of the Internet, based on conditions you define. If you don't know it, you should definitely check it out.
- Create a dedicated Twitter account for my notifications as I don't want my primary account to be "spammed".
- Use this twitter account as the output in IFTT : I send a tweet to my notification account each time a new item is published in the RSS feed.
- Use official Twitter client in MacOS, add the notification account and set notifications for new messages on this account to "Growl".
- Use the free app Hiss to convert Growl notifications to Mountain Lion notification center ones.
And that's it ! Now each time a new item (refreshed every 15 minutes) is published on Hacker News, I get a notification on my desktop and the item is queued up (up to 20 items) in my notification center.
Alternatively, I tried for a while to send every new item to my Readability account, but I ended up filling it with unread items and I needed a server to run the cron: not ideal.
With this solution I have one limitation at the moment: if I restart the Twitter app, Hiss re-sends every notifications from the beginning... But I hardly ever restart it.
Do you have a better workflow?
EDIT: I found this free app on the App Store, which does the same from your Google Reader account.
