As of the last few years, it’s becoming more and more commonplace that news of a semi-urgent nature gets pushed out online quickly. In the case of Code Maroon, you can get a notification if Texas A&M University is going to be closed or if a building is on fire. These types of messages are pretty handy, but messages don’t get delivered to e-mail very quickly.
Most people sign up for text messages, but this doesn’t work for me because I exclusively use Google Voice for managing my text messages. What I’d like to do is get a quick notification on my phone whenever one of these things go out, so that I don’t bother to try to go somewhere that’s closed or the like.
So I’d really like to use something like Prowl to send out the notifications. The other thing is that Code Maroon isn’t necessarily the most effective at getting out the message that something of interest is happening on campus, since they presumably never want to send out a false alert. For the recent Zachry building fire, the student newspaper (The Battalion) reported that the building was on fire on their Twitter feed before Code Maroon.
My solution to this notification problem is to pull different campus RSS feeds, and sift out the interesting bits, and then push it out over Prowl to my iPhone. This cleanly solves the notification problem, fixes the expediency problem, and does a best effort job in throwing away things like test messages.
Link to the script here: RSS Notify v0.1
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