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Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

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Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#51
Good stuff, although I'm not a Ruby user. Tools like this should be much more widespread. Code Is Bad because you can't write code without a minimum level of vocabulary and syntax, and that excludes a lot of people. True, code offers the most flexibility, but 99% of the time people don't need all that flexibility and want to accomplish fairly straightforward tasks - which is why GUIs are the norm. With GUIs and visual network design, users select from a palette of what's available and can connect components together without wasting time on syntax.

The oft-repeated cry that 'everyone should learn to code' is wrong, wrong, wrong. It's like telling a kid to learn CAD and use a makerbot instead of providing them with a Lego set. Coding is great when you want to make a procedural something generator. If you want to make something specific, then coding often imposes an annoying and unnecessary layer of abstraction. For example, you can write music and/or perform sound synthesis in a superbly powerful language called CSound, but only a tiny number of academic masochists bother to do so. Commercial DSP engineers write in C or assembler, commercial sound designers use Max or Reaktor, much as most electronic engineers use SPICE rather than describe their circuits in code.

In short, keep up the good work!

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#52
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I wasn't. :) Do you think I should change the name?

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

Odd, there was that old Magpie RSS php library...

I think calling this app Ravens has a better ring to it.

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#53

Good stuff, although I'm not a Ruby user. Tools like this should be much more widespread. Code Is Bad because you can't write code without a minimum level of vocabulary and syntax, and that excludes a lot of people. True, code offers the most flexibility, but 99% of the time people don't need all that flexibility and want to accomplish fairly straightforward tasks - which is why GUIs are the norm. With GUIs and visua…

>> The oft-repeated cry that 'everyone should learn to code' is wrong, wrong, wrong.

It is right, right, right. We don't tell our children, it's ok to stop at crayons and comic books.

Yes, DSPs and CAD are much more productive at their niches than coding in a "normal" language. I find Chrome more productive than "telnet 80" - but knowledge of coding helps me structure my excel spreadsheets more usefully than those produced by intelligent people who cannot code.

Code literacy is important not just because there are faster or easier ways to express ones ideas in a given domain. Literacy is not about using one language - it's about learning to structure thoughts and express them in the best way possible - something learnt cover thousands of years and code literacy is the same - we epxress our thoughts better if we are literate.

Having said that, I cannot wait to try this out,

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#54
post #45
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!

Heh, I'd forgotten about that one :D. I've had the idea kicking around for a long time, and have spiked it in a few different languages (the Haskell version was mainly to try out FRP and reactive-banana; I've got the furthest on a Python one that hinges around agents tied to RabbitMQ as my current "production" deployment). I'll try and get the Elixir stuff cleaned up and published over the next week :). The only sour…

Would you care to open the Python implementation? (and thx for open sourcing the Ruby one)

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#55

Good stuff, although I'm not a Ruby user. Tools like this should be much more widespread. Code Is Bad because you can't write code without a minimum level of vocabulary and syntax, and that excludes a lot of people. True, code offers the most flexibility, but 99% of the time people don't need all that flexibility and want to accomplish fairly straightforward tasks - which is why GUIs are the norm. With GUIs and visua…

A service like this needs booth.

Writing processes in a programming language AND a possibility to reuse them for different stuff.

IFTTT is a nice idea, but I can't do stuff like:

1. check rss feed for new stuff 2. generate links to the real data from the links in the rss. (most RSS feeds just suck, because they don't have the full articles and sometimes they link to crazy pages where the article is split in 10 sub-pages) 3. get all the pages you want the data from 4. parse the relevant stuff out of the pages 5. save the stuff to a place where it won't get deleted again from third party

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...

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#56
post #2

This has been my side project for the last few months. I'm very interested in your feedback!

This is awesome! We were just talking about building a desktop IFTTT. Can't wait to play with this tonight and learn to make 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

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#57
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I wasn't. :) Do you think I should change the name?

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

@Metapony: you're hellbanned, for quite a while now.

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#58
post #50
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I wasn't. :) Do you think I should change the name?

Same here. It's confusing. Muninn would seem like appropriate alternative.

"Munin" is already very well known as a distributed server monitoring system: http://munin-monitoring.org/

Re: Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes

#60
post #55

Good stuff, although I'm not a Ruby user. Tools like this should be much more widespread. Code Is Bad because you can't write code without a minimum level of vocabulary and syntax, and that excludes a lot of people. True, code offers the most flexibility, but 99% of the time people don't need all that flexibility and want to accomplish fairly straightforward tasks - which is why GUIs are the norm. With GUIs and visua…

A service like this needs booth. Writing processes in a programming language AND a possibility to reuse them for different stuff. IFTTT is a nice idea, but I can't do stuff like: 1. check rss feed for new stuff 2. generate links to the real data from the links in the rss. (most RSS feeds just suck, because they don't have the full articles and sometimes they link to crazy pages where the article is split in 10 sub-pa…

  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!
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