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The Huginn software is not only good for monitoring Twitter feeds, it can also be used to monitor websites for changes.

That's actually easy and needs only two agents:

• Website Agent
• Notification Agent - Email Agent, maybe

One of the things I'm using Huginn for is monitoring for Twitter keywords. Some of them might appear in pairs, as example people like to tag Tweets about PostgreSQL with both #postgresql and #postgres. When I was using IFTTT this always created two emails, one for each hashtag. With Huginn I can deduplicate the events, and only notify about the first occurrence.

I need the following agents for this scenario:

• Twitter Search Agent
• Trigger Agent
• De Duplication Agent
• Email Agent

Huginn comes with a number of Twitter agents, but before they can be used you need to authenticate them. That process requires multiple steps, and they are not well documented.

The basics are described on the "Configuring OAuth applications" Wiki page.

For the Twitter integration one must know that you are using a single Twitter app for all users, but every Huginn user can (and should) have this app authenticated against their own Twitter account. Therefore if you want to use multiple Twitter accounts in Huginn, you need multiple Huginn users.

Huginn is a great piece of software, but the documentation is ... a bit sparse. Especially when it comes to details of the agents. I'm going to blog about a couple more more examples in the future.

For another project I'm using Leaflet, a JavaScript library for rendering maps in a browser. New versions are released occasionally, and I want to know when it's time to update the project website. Huginn can do that.

After setting up Huginn, and implementing the actions on my todo list, I had a look at the available agents and started thinking what else they can be useful for.

One of the ideas I came up with is monitoring if a website is available, or has some trouble. I already have a monitoring system in place, but it's a nice exercise to learn more about the other agents.

A while ago I started using Huginn, as a replacement for IFTTT. That's going quite well. Huginn offers more features, integrations, and especially your chains (scenarios) can be as complex as you wish. IFTTT is quite limited in this area.

I use the Twitter integration to find certain Tweets. Now this does not only find native Tweets, but also finds every Retweet made for a native Tweet. Obviously I am not interested in duplicate content.

Huginn offers a way to filter out Retweets.