{"id":1585,"date":"2014-08-25T07:03:35","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T13:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=1585"},"modified":"2014-08-20T07:04:53","modified_gmt":"2014-08-20T13:04:53","slug":"consolidate-external-dependency-notifications-using-zapier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1585","title":{"rendered":"Consolidate external dependency notifications using Zapier"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 240px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Tuareg Men Using Binoculars in the Sahara by M1key.me\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/14580331520_c1999f3589_m_binoculars.jpg\" alt=\"binoculars photo\" width=\"240\" height=\"159\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"><small>Photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/91418149@N03\/14580331520\" target=\"_blank\">M1key.me<\/a> <a title=\"Attribution License\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-inject\/images\/cc.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>As I wrote over at the Geek Estate Blog, if <a href=\"http:\/\/geekestateblog.com\/monitoring-microvendors\/\">you build your business on vendors, you should monitor them<\/a>. \u00a0In the past, I&#8217;ve used a variety of services to monitor vendor services, from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pingdom.com\">pingdom<\/a> to wget\/cron to nagios. \u00a0These services are great about telling you when some external service is unavailable, but are not so hot at telling you when a service is going to be down (for planned maintenance) or back up.<\/p>\n<p>For that, you need to be monitoring, and reading, vendor announcements, however the vendor has decided to provide them, whether that is as a blog\/RSS feed, twitter feed, email newsletter, a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statuspage.io\/\">status page<\/a>\u00a0or something else.<\/p>\n<p>However, it can be tough to monitor and read announcements in two or more places. \u00a0Here, Zapier or a similar service can help. \u00a0Pick one place to be notified. \u00a0For me, that&#8217;s typically an email inbox, because, frankly, other data sources can be ignored (except phone texts), but I&#8217;ll always check my email.<\/p>\n<p>Then, use Zapier&#8217;s zaps to transform any announcements from the other sources to emails. \u00a0For instance, there is an <a href=\"https:\/\/zapier.com\/help\/rss\/#supported-triggers\">RSS trigger for new items in a feed<\/a> and a <a href=\"https:\/\/zapier.com\/help\/twitter\/#supported-triggers\">Twitter trigger for tweets from a user<\/a>. \u00a0Status pages often provide RSS feeds (Google&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/appsstatus\">does<\/a>). \u00a0If the service provider doesn&#8217;t provide a structured method like an RSS feed to notify you of changes, but does provide a webpage of announcements, you could look at a service like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.changedetection.com\/\">changedetection.com<\/a>\u00a0and have the email sent to your inbox or <a href=\"http:\/\/parser.zapier.com\/\">parsed by Zapier<\/a> and pushed to your notification location.<\/p>\n<p>And for the output side, you can just use Zapier&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/zapier.com\/help\/email\/#supported-actions\">&#8216;send outbound email&#8217;<\/a> action. \u00a0If you want to have all notifications pushed to your phone, an RSS reader or Twitter acount, you can use Zapier to <a href=\"https:\/\/zapier.com\/help\/sms\/#supported-actions\">send texts<\/a>, create RSS items or tweets as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I wrote over at the Geek Estate Blog, if you build your business on vendors, you should monitor them. \u00a0In the past, I&#8217;ve used a variety of services to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,35,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apis","category-business","category-useful-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1585"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1590,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585\/revisions\/1590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}