Use Node-RED to Get Twitter Mention Alerts

Productivity Sauce

I don't use Twitter a lot, which explains why I often miss mentions from other users. But checking for mentions manually is as practical as playing tennis with a broom stick. Node-RED to the rescue! I already have a Node-RED instance running on my Raspberry Pi, so all I had to do was to write a simple flow that monitors Twitter for mentions and sends email alerts to me. The flow consists of three nodes. The Twitter node searches all public tweets for @dmpop (that's my Twitter handle) mentions, while the Function node uses a simple function to construct a message that is then sent to the email address specified in the Email node. Pretty simple stuff really.

If you want to deploy a similar flow on your Node-RED installation, you don't need to start from scratch. Copy the flow definition from this gist. In Node-RED, click on the hamburger button in the upper-right corner of the main window, choose Import | Clipboard, paste the copied code, and hit OK. Specify the required options in each node, and hit Deploy to activate the flow.