js-on-hn-emailer

Send yourself an email every time a new post about Javascript is shared on Hacker News

##Description If you are like me, you spend a lot of time on Hacker News. Surely, a lot of the articles posted are interesting, but of particular attention for a Javascript developer are the ones about Javascript. Never to miss a single one of these posts, I have decided to create a small tool that sends me and email for each new post containing the substrings JS or Javascript in the title.

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##Tools

• This project uses io.js. The main reason for choosing it over node.js has been the fact that it supports some ES6 like template strings that make the life of a Javascript developer more enjoyable. If you want to use node.js, you should be able to do so by using var every time I used let and by building your strings concatenating them with +.
• Firebase. A reason to love the HN APIs is that they are on Firebase. Since there is an npm module for firebase, it has never been so easy to use a web API.
• Email.js. I did not know this npm module before, but after playing a bit with it, I cannot think of a better way to send an email from your io.js/node.js application. You will only need an SMTP server available (I use Gmail's one for this project).
• Git. Because it is 2015 and there is absolute no excuse for not to use a Version control systems (VCS).

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##Project setup These are the basic setup steps to create your JS on HN Emailer project:

#Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/syymza/js-on-hn-emailer.git

#Enter the new folder
cd js-on-hn-emailer

#Install the submodules
npm install

#Create your config file
touch config.json

Now open the config.json file you have just created and put your SMTP credentials in it:

{
    "username": "<your_username>",
    "password": "<your_password>",
    "email"   : "<your_email>"
}

That'a all. Run index.js with node index.js and you should start to receive an email for each new post about Javascript posted on Hacker News.

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##Credits This post has been inspired by a similar post on the Twilio blog: Get Notified When Someone Posts An Article From Your Domain on Hacker News Using Node.js, Firebase and Twilio.