Tuesday, June 2, 2015; 10:42:17 AM Eastern
Connecting Slack with RSS
- I set up a test channel on Slack and hooked it up to the Hacker News "firehose" feed, which is fairly high volume. About 20 or 30 posts per hour. I wanted to see how fast it would update.
- I also wrote a small Node.js app that reads the same feed and posts to another Slack channel, as a control. It will post at most one item per minute. So they come out fairly steadily as long as more items are being posted to Hacker News.
- I have also set up an IFTTT recipe to read the feed and see how it compares.
- #### Update #1
- It took about 1/2 hour for IFTTT to push a dozen items to our group at once.
- #### Update #2
- Another 1/4 hour another storm of updates from IFTTT.
- Still nothing from Slack's RSS bot.
- My Node app is chugging along, posting one item a minute.
- #### Update #3 -- 12:20PM Eastern
- It's been over an hour and still nothing from Slack.
- #### Update #4 -- 2:40PM Eastern
- We are now getting updates from Slack's native RSS support.
- They do more than report headlines, they're scraping the articles that are being linked to from the HN firehose feed.
- But they're doing that with some of the links we push from the Node.js app.
- And now it's been a couple of hours since the IFTTT bot has posted any new stuff, yet the feed is updating continually.
- Then as if by magic a small flood of IFTTT posts from the feed.
- Early conclusions: Slack's native integration is slow and bursty. IFTTT is more regular but bursty. Lots of messages all at once. Neither is ideal for a frequently updating feed.