What I Built
Morning Joy lets you start each day on a good note by texting you an uplifting news story and a picture of something cute.
Following the news can be stressful or even depressing. This is one small way to remember that good things are happening too.
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morning-joy
Wake up to a happy text every day!
How I Built It
I signed up for Twilio and followed their quickstart guide for Node.js. I bought a phone number and tested sending a text to myself. This was painless. I probably spent more time picking the phone number than I did writing the code.
Next, I needed to find a source for the content that I can count on to be renewed on a daily basis and to be of high quality. I decided to use Reddit's r/aww and r/UpliftingNews subreddits. They are two of the largest subreddits, so I should never get duplicate content. I also decided to grab the first post when sorting by top for today, which means the community has heavily upvoted the post.
I looked into the best way to fetch posts from Reddit. At first I thought I would use their API, but it turns out that Reddit has a convenient feature where you can simply append .json to the end of a subreddit URL to receive the data as JSON: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww.json.
This worked well, but I didn't know how to sort it by top for today rather than hot. I discovered that a query parameter does the trick: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/top.json?t=day.
I wrote a script to grab the top posts for both subreddits and then text them using Twilio.
Lastly, I needed a way to schedule the script to run every morning. To keep it simple, I converted my script into an AWS Lambda function and set up a CloudWatch Events rule that triggers on a schedule to fire the function every day at 10 a.m. UTC. The schedule expression is: cron(0 10 * * ? *).
This was a relatively simple project, but I'm looking forward to seeing what I get every morning!
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