Show HN: HN Follow – email alerts from your friends on Hacker News
www.hnfollow.comHN Follow lets you “follow” authors on Hacker News, and get email notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and hnreplies.com.
The app was built in an experimental style. Instead of being a normal app where we store all your data, it is just a wrapper over a series of JavaScript snippets that we guide you through installing, and which you can then customize 100%. The scripts call out to Agolia’s wonderful HN Search API. You can read more about the app’s architecture and it’s motivation here[1].
HN Follow runs on Val Town [2], an online scripting tool my team and I are building. Part of why we built hnfollow.com is to show off the kind of things you can do with the primitives Val Town provides:emailing yourself (`console.email`), persistent state (`@me.foo = "bar"`), persistent cron jobs (`setInterval`), etc. Here’s a demo[3], the docs[4], and Discord[5] for Val Town.
We hope hnfollow.com is useful to you, and you have fun customizing the code directly on Val Town! Let us know if you have questions or feedback
[1] - https://www.notion.so/End-programmer-Programming-a749beb4a9b...
[2] - https://val.town
[3] - https://www.loom.com/share/878294970d8e48919c819f35d0cd0da4
[4] - https://www.notion.so/Val-Town-Docs-01c8eb9c534b4899802f3a9e...
Alternatively, there's also https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds where you can just subscribe to a user via your RSS reader.
This isn't really a Show HN of your overall project - it's just an example, and one which distracts attention from what's interesting here. https://www.val.town/ is much more interesting than an HN email alert.
Why don't you write up a Show HN blurb for https://www.val.town/ that talks about what the project is, how you came to work on it, what's different about it, how it's implemented, and so on? You can include your HN alert example as part of that.
If you email me at hn@ycombinator.com, I'll be happy to help.
So, val.town is like a consistent localStorage in the cloud essentially, with a scheduler?
Yes, exactly!