Following on from the post I shared on Word to WordPress, I wanted to share another post that makes my life much easier when it comes to work and that’s having the ability to receive notifications in one place.

I seem to have become a big user of Slack, which the email side of my life has really calmed down the instant messaging, always on nature of Slack has rocketed I think at last count I had 9 Slack teams including the one that I am using for this notification piece.

We all read blogs, and we all consume information from various sources this can be via RSS to maybe an RSS feeder to centrally capture all articles that have just been published, I use Feedly for my daily catch up for all content out there. And that works well, when I get the chance I check in and work me through the many feeds and read the interesting stuff.

But it was another Application and another thing to remember to look at during the day. I also for work have a similar task where I want and need to be more active within the Veeam forums. Because I live in Slack on the side pretty much all day long, phone, laptop or desktop there is Slack installed. for this example, I am using the Veeam forums to capture the new posts via something called Zapier to this custom made slack team I have created with only me in.

Let’s head over to https://zapier.com/ first we need to create a new account. Once you have created this will create you a free plan tier. I would advise the free plan to begin with get the feel of how the platform works and if it works for you and you require more tasks or zaps then obviously you can pay for the pleasure.

The first step in creating this notification engine to Slack is selecting the elements or Apps that we need for the workflow. You will see in this list thousands of Apps and the different things you can do with them. For this to work I needed to find RSS.

Once you find your RSS App you then define what do you want to do with that App and this is where you have another search and you find Slack.

By pairing these together, you are creating something called a Zap. The following screen shows what the Zap will do.

I imagine that some of the other Apps have more options here but all I want my RSS App to do is capture all new posts, comments etc and then send them to my slack team channel.

Next up is adding the RSS URL that you want to capture from, with the Veeam forums there are internal channels so for this I added an additional auth=http which allows me to authenticate to allow me to get those new posts that are in the hidden internal forums.

Add in those forum credentials

Finally, this will give a summary of what it is going to do and run a test against that.

We then want to select some configuration for the Slack channel, we need to define what team channel this is going to and which channel. Pretty sure there are some channels in my Slack list that wouldn’t want this information so to make sure you select the correct one. Within Slack I created a new slack channel named veeam_forum and this channel will only show forum posts.

I think when you first sign up for Zapier it’s a 30-day trial and unlimited tasks and zaps after which that’s when they want you to pay for things. On the 31st day or maybe even before as I think I exceeded the opening free tier of tasks with other zaps and integrations I created for Reddit and Twitter.

It’s worth a try though if this is where you spend a lot of time during the day.