Howdy, HN. I recently finished up a community college course in RoR (I'm usually a learn-on-my-own type person, but being busy I thought that having assignments, etc. would keep me on track with the learning task) and the beginnings of Hacker News Notify was my final project. I had some time this past weekend, so I finished it up and thought some folks here might find it useful.<p>Hacker News Notify allows you to create a watch list for submissions with particular phrases in the title, submitted from a particular user, or from a particular domain and be notified via email of matches or subscribe to your watch list’s RSS feed. The application scans the "New Links" section of HN (currently) every 15 minutes.<p>It’s definitely not an example of programming genius and I’m sure many here could whip it up in an hour or less, but hopefully some find it handy in some way.<p>Thanks.
Very cool, how valuable was the course for you, and was it mostly online? I'm on the fence on whether I should continue with my informal study or bite the bullet and take a structured class.
Good work, though this looks like a perfect job for Yahoo Pipes.<p>For example:
<a href="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec3e22c92eadf748f" rel="nofollow">http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec...</a><p>This one filters out stuff like techcrunch/Ask YN, but you can easily make it only allow certain keywords.
It would also be interesting to be notified when a certain user posts a comment - I have a competitor on this site and want to track his posts :) Nice site!