While visiting BuddyCloud Towers over the Christmas break I finally sat down and started something I’ve wanted for a while: up-to-the-minute notifications when one of my posts is submitted to Hacker News:

Timing is everything: the HN newest page is a cruel and capricious master; there are lots of posts being submitted and not a lot to distinguish between them. If you take the time to respond to comments early and add your vote to that of the original submitter, it gives your post a much better chance to be read.

The window before dropping off the all-important new submissions page? 30-60 minutes, give or take. Google Alerts might as well be sent by snail mail.

Other times, an old post is resubmitted (as RiderOfGiraffes was recently kind enough to do for one of mine). When that happened, I wanted to reopen a closed poll, update some old links and join in the discussion. Luckily Mat emailed me when it hit the front page but I could just have easily missed it altogether.

So I hacked together http://youreonthenews.appspot.com/ to solve the problem. It’s a simple two-page app on a GAE stack that does just what it says - emails you when a post from your domain is submitted to Hacker News.

Give it a go and let me know what you think, what you’d like to see and what doesn’t work!