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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#1
For my travel site side hustle (beatthatflight.com.au/), I find and publish cheap flights for Australians. Sounds simple, but even if say, someone gave me the flights each day, there's posting the, sometimes to deals sites, as well as then editing it and posting it on my site, and out to social media, and then to specific mailing lists on mailchimp, depending on the source city of the deal, or type of post.

A LOT of that becomes tedious. Mailchimp can auto post to FB/twitter/instagram etc, but even converting the blog post into mailchimp emails gets tiring, as you need to choose a feature photo, the specific mailing list etc.

I'm a selenium guy, so have built some scripts to minimise some of it, but the rush each time of finding a deal still pains me when I think of the tedium ahead of publishing it.

Ideally, my goal would be to submit [to][from][when] to a script and the whole process would be automatic. I can see that selenium could do it, but my goodness, it'd be slow and potentially flaky all via the web UI for those sites.

I'd love suggestions, examples of automation you've done, and tools used?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#2
I started with selenium and still use it when I have to but try to just make http requests and parse responses directly whenever possible. Probably my favorite travel-related script was one that watched for an opening at a hard to book hotel and snatched it up when it became available.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#3

I started with selenium and still use it when I have to but try to just make http requests and parse responses directly whenever possible. Probably my favorite travel-related script was one that watched for an opening at a hard to book hotel and snatched it up when it became available.

and to parse the responses (Assuming they're HTML page sources, not json/xml) - you using scrapy or something else?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#4
I just commented on something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22345215

Disclaimer, it’s a project of mine, but if the websites you’re watching are compatible that will save you some hassle trying to extract data.

Use a lot of google sheets as well, it’s super helpful to make sense and use of the data you scrape.

You can check it out here [0], and feel free to ask if you need something.

[0]: https://monitoro.xyz

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#5
I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#9

I've used IFTTT a bit, along with Zapier. Biggest issue is trying to do multiple actions when you need to automate tasks for multiple rows of data at a time.

Do you have some examples of what you use them for?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#10
post #7

We use Jenkins to run .bat files that package our video game, upload to Steam and spool up Gamelift matchmaking servers on AWS every night. Before this I did it by hand, now I wonder how I could ever have operated with that inefficiency!

How do you find Gamelift? I don't know anything at all about the industry but I'm curious how it all hangs together!
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