There's another open-source tool named Huginn[1] that does something like this. You write "agents" that perform a given task and then pass the resulting onto other agents that do things like run stats, send emails, etc.
sendmail and mailx require a running SMTP server on your computer, which we chose to be postfix.
To actually send the mails, we use the aptly named 'nodemailer' module, with the 'smtp' transport mechanism, which also relies on a running SMTP server. (btw, one can use a 'sendmail' transport mechanism).
It looks like a meta Google alerts, but it's open source and hackable, which can be really handy. A documentation of how to write custom alerts would be useful, I guess.
Yeah, we thought about a demo. It was kind of hard to picture a way to demo it, given that you can't really see it in action. Any suggestions welcome.
Re: Google Alerts - you're right... to a certain extent. Here, you can mash up datasets, compile them, tweak them, THEN and only then compare them to parameters you set. Alerts++, then.
As a person with a penchant for data, but with limited coding experience, I agree.
I have hard time reconciling:
"Don't know how to code? That's fine."
With:
"The code is available on Github, and that's where you should start. Just clone the repo and run the installation script located at root."
I think you seriously overestimate the layman's abilities here. Is this for programming laymen? Github is one of the last things people learn, for better or worse.
Yes, we are still a bit new with Node and the best practices when it comes to installation process. I went for what came in mind immediately, but there's obviously room for improvement. Any thoughts or comments are welcome! Thank you :)
Or why you shouldn't do the doc last minute! Any suggestions here are very welcome.
To have a look at some snippets, I would recommend going through the wizard, then cracking open one of the examples. The plumbing is a bit overly-complicated, though, I am sure there is a way to make queries in a simpler way.
[1]: https://github.com/cantino/huginn