How to Automate Weather and Job Alerts with Zapier

Learn how to use Zapier to automate every day tasks in your life. We’ll walk through setting up an automation for sending you a text if it’s going to rain, setting a print job to print a test page once a week, and sending you an email notification every time there’s a new job via RSS feed.

Every day, we perform hundreds of small tasks. On their own, they don’t take much time. But they can add up, especially if you consider that time for a whole year.

But we’re technologists and it’s 2020. How can we use tools like Zapier to make robots do these things for us?

What is Zapier?
What can we do with Zapier Zaps?
Zap 1: Get a text if it’s going to rain with Zapier
Zap 2: Print a test every week with Google Cloud Print
Zap 3: Smashing Magazine Job Alerts with Gmail

What is Zapier?

Zapier is an automation tool that connects all of the apps you love and builds powerful fully automated workflows. Whether it’s automating sending an email or making sure that new blog post gets a tweet, we can remove the manual steps of mundane tasks to focus on other things that art important.

Each time you create a new workflow, you’re creating a “Zap”. It’s essentially Zapier’s way to give a name to the workflow you create.

What can we do with Zapier Zaps?

The brilliant part about Zapier is each app integration makes its API available via Zapier to other app integrations giving you a ton of options to connect and build powerful workflows.

Particularly, we’re going to learn how to do a few things:

Sending a text every morning if it’s going to rain
Set up a weekly print job to keep your ink fresh
Receive emails for new jobs on Smashing Magazine’s job board

While each of these tasks are small, they end up saving you a lot of time. And if you’re creative, you can build upon these workflows to customize a whole lot more.

Getting started with a Zapier account

Before we get into setting up workflows, you’ll need an account.

Signing up for Zapier is free and you get 5 free Zaps to start, so we don’t have to worry about cost here.

Now let’s get into the Zaps.

Zap 1: Get a text if it’s going to rain with Zapier

To get an idea of how this works, we’ll start with something simple. We’re going to set up a Zap that will send us a text message if the weather predicts rain.

To get started, click the big Make a Zap button on the top left of the page when you’re logged into your account.

Making a new Zap

Here, Zapier wants to know the first app we want to connect. Since we’re going to base our Zap on the weather, search for “weather” and select Weather by Zapier.

Selecting the Weather by Zapier integration

It will then ask you to choose a Trigger Event, where you’ll select “Will It Rain Today?”, then you can click the Continue button.

Choosing the Will it Rain Today? event

When choosing Weather as an event, it requires a little bit of information to give us a personalized prediction. Particularly, it requires your Latitude and Longitude, which we can look up using latlong.net.

Finding latitude and longitude with latlong.net

You can then enter your Latitude and Longitude into the Customize Forecast screen of Zapier, select your Units which defaults to Fahrenheit, and then click the big Continue button.

Configuring forecast with latitude and longitude

At this point, you can click Test Trigger, which simply makes sure it’s working, and click Continue again.

Now we’re going to tell Zapier what to do with the information once it knows it’s going to rain.

In the “Do this…” panel, search for “sms” and select SMS by Zapier.

Selecting SMS by Zapier

We’re going to leave the App and Event as the defaults, so the next screen you can just click Continue.

SMS App and Event

Now, for Zapier to send you a text, it needs to verify that your phone number belongs to you or that the phone number is knowingly signing up for these texts. To do that, it sends you a one-time PIN that you’ll enter.

So click Sign in to SMS by Zapier, which will open a popup window.

Here, enter your phone number, and choose Sms or Call as the verification method at which point it will contact you with a PIN.

Sign in to SMS by Zapier and send a PIN

With that PIN, enter it into the field and click Continue.

Entering the SMS verification PING

At this point the window will close and move you back to the original flow. Here, click Continue again.

Now we get to customize the text that we receive.

In the From Number field, Zapier gives a bunch of phone numbers you can use. You can either select one number to always send from, which you can set up as a contact so you know it’s Zapier, or you can select Random, which will use a random number every time.

Then, click inside of Message, and it will bring up some options. I want to know everything possible if it’s going to rain, including the probability, max temperature, and summary, so we can select all or as much as we want and again click Continue.

Configuring Weather message

Finally we get to test if our Zap worked. At this point everything should be configured, so click the Test & Review button and you should receive a sample text!

Note: If you choose a single From Number, you might be limited in how frequent you can receive texts, so if you don’t get it right away, that might be why. Setting random helps prevent that issue, but the the number isn’t consistent.

And once you’re happy with the configuration, you can click Turn On Zap.

Turning on the SMS Zap

You’ll now get texts in the morning if the weather is predicting rain!

Zap 2: Print a test every week with Google Cloud Print

This one doesn’t sound exciting, but have you ever gone through a long period of time where you didn’t print something, only to end up with dried out printer heads or worse yet, a now unsalvageable printer?

We can avoid this by simply running a weekly print job that keeps our printer ink nice and fresh.

For this, we’ll use Google Cloud Print. To make this work, you’ll need to already have this configured with your Google account.

Let’s create a new Zap and this time for our “When this happens…” search for and select Schedule by Zapier.

Selecting Schedule by Zapier

We can then select a Trigger Event of Every Week and click Continue.

Setting Trigger Event as Every Week

Next, you can choose the Day Of The Week and Time Of Day you’d like to print. I personally run this job weekly at 8pm on Sundays right before the start of a new week. Once configured, click Continue.

Configuring Zapier schedule

At this point, we can click Test trigger, which just like before makes sure it’s working properly, and then we can click Continue.

Now, for our “Do this…” we want to print, so search for and select Google Cloud Print.

Selecting Google Cloud Print

And for the action, select Submit Print Job.

Setting Submit Print Job as Action Event

At this point, you’ll need to sign into Google Cloud Print. This will open a window and have you log in through Google so that Zapier can interface with the service.

Once connected, click Continue.

Now we can configure out print job. Here we’ll want to define what we print.

Configuring Print Job in Zapier

In the above, we’re configuring:

Which Printer: the printer we want to print to connected to Google Cloud Print
Content: this can be a URL to a document, HTML, or plain text. I’m using a URL which is a simple test page I made that has some color in it
Content Type: you’ll want to set this depending on what you set in Content. If you set a URL like I did, it should be URL
Title Of Print Job: the name of the job so you can see it in the print logs
Number of Copies: probably just want 1 so it doesn’t waste ink and paper
Color or Monochrome: you’ll want to explicitly set this if you want color. The idea is to refresh all of the ink cartridges, so only printing black won’t help the color ink, so in my case, I selected color

The rest of the fields are optional, feel free to customize to your liking.

With our configuration set, click Continue, and similar to before, we can click Test to see our print job in action and if we’re happy, we can click Turn on Zap!

Test print from Zapier print job

If you want to use the same document, you can find it here: https://fay.io/printer-test.pdf

Zap 3: Smashing Magazine Job Alerts with Gmail

If we’re looking for a job, it can be a pain to have to visit every job board every day (or every hour, am I right?). But we can automate this process when the job board supports it.

Luckily, job boards like Smashing Magazine and a whole lot of others provide RSS feeds which we can hook right in to Zapier to automate getting an email whenever a new job is posted.

To get started, let’s create a new Zap, and this time, search for RSS and select RSS by Zapier.

Selecting RSS by Zapier

For our Trigger Event, select New Item in Feed, then click Continue.

Setting New Item in Feed as Trigger Event

At this point, we want to enter a feed URL. This will be the URL to the XML RSS feed that websites make available. For Smashing Magazine, you can find it here:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/jobs/feed

So enter that URL above into Feed URL (you can leave Username and Password blank), and keep Different GUID selected for What Triggers A New Feed Item. Then click Continue.

Setting RSS Feed URL

Same as usual, now you can test the trigger to make sure it works. If the RSS feed is valid, this will be smooth, otherwise you might see an error. The above URL should be valid!

Testing the RSS feed

Next, we need to choose what we want to do with the new item. Since we want it emailed, we can choose our email service, which in my case is Gmail.

Selecting Gmail in Zapier

For our action, we want to Send Email.

Setting Action Event as Send Email

Next, you want to sign in to your account, similar to what we did with Google Cloud Print. This should be your Google account that you use Gmail with.

Sign in to Gmail

Now when we customize our email, we want to include the following:

To: wherever you want these sent to, probably the same account you signed into Gmail with
From: select your Gmail account
From Name: can be anything you’ll recognize, like I’ll use Colbybot
Subject: can be whatever you’d like, but a helpful idea could be “New Job Alert:" followed by selecting the title from the dropdown selection
Body Type: you can leave as Plain
Body: I would recommend including all tokens you’ll find helpful including the Title, Description, and Link

Configuring job notification email

Once you’re done configuring, you can hit continue. Then, similar to before, click Test & Review, and you should receive your test email.

Test job alert email

Finally if you’re happy with the configuration, turn on the Zap, and enjoy your job search!

What else can you do?

More Ideas

Here’s more ideas to get you moving in the right direction:

Post Tweets to Slack: every time an account tweets or someone from a list of accounts tweets, post that tweet to Slack
File Github Bugs to Jira: whenever someone tags a Github Issue with a label of “bug”, create a new ticket in Jira with that Issue details
Post RSS Items to Twitter: do you write your own content? Set up an RSS feed to automatically post a tweet with your new blog post

Not Google Assistant

The only thing that it’s missing for me right now is Google Assistant, otherwise I would have included some Zap ideas for that. IFTTT supports Google Assistant for simpler flows, but Zapier can get more powerful.

#zapier #developer

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

How to Automate Weather and Job Alerts with Zapier

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Automation Testing Tips

Thorough testing is crucial to the success of a software product. If your software doesn’t work properly, chances are strong that most people won’t buy or use it…at least not for long. But testing to find defects or bugs is time-consuming, expensive, often repetitive, and subject to human error. Automated testing, in which Quality Assurance teams use software tools to run detailed, repetitive, and data-intensive tests automatically, helps teams improve software quality and make the most of their always-limited testing resources.

Use these top tips to ensure that your software testing is successful and you get the maximum return on investment (ROI):

Decide What Test Cases to Automate
Test Early and Test Often
Select the Right Automated Testing Tool
Divide your Automated Testing Efforts
Create Good, Quality Test Data
Create Automated Tests that are Resistant to Changes in the UI

Decide What Test Cases to Automate

It is impossible to automate all testing, so it is important to determine what test cases should be automated first.

The benefit of automated testing is linked to how many times a given test can be repeated. Tests that are only performed a few times are better left for manual testing. Good test cases for automation are ones that are run frequently and require large amounts of data to perform the same action.

You can get the most benefit out of your automated testing efforts by automating:

Repetitive tests that run for multiple builds.
Tests that tend to cause human error.
Tests that require multiple data sets.
Frequently used functionality that introduces high-risk conditions.
Tests that are impossible to perform manually.
Tests that run on several different hardware or software platforms and configurations.
Tests that take a lot of effort and time when manual testing.

Success in test automation requires careful planning and design work. Start out by creating an automation plan. This allows you to identify the initial set of tests to automate and serve as a guide for future tests. First, you should define your goal for automated testing and determine which types of tests to automate. There are a few different types of testing, and each has its place in the testing process. For instance, unit testing is used to test a small part of the intended application. To test a certain piece of the application’s UI, you would use functional or GUI testing.

After determining your goal and which types of tests to automate, you should decide what actions your automated tests will perform. Don’t just create test steps that test various aspects of the application’s behavior at one time. Large, complex automated tests are difficult to edit and debug. It is best to divide your tests into several logical, smaller tests. It makes your test environment more coherent and manageable and allows you to share test code, test data, and processes. You will get more opportunities to update your automated tests just by adding small tests that address new functionality. Test the functionality of your application as you add it, rather than waiting until the whole feature is implemented.

When creating tests, try to keep them small and focused on one objective. For example, separate tests for read-only versus reading/write tests. This allows you to use these individual tests repeatedly without including them in every automated test.

Once you create several simple automated tests, you can group your tests into one, larger automated test. You can organize automated tests by the application’s functional area, major/minor division in the application, common functions, or a base set of test data. If an automated test refers to other tests, you may need to create a test tree, where you can run tests in a specific order.

Test Early and Test Often

To get the most out of your automated testing, testing should be started as early as possible and ran as often as needed. The earlier testers get involved in the life cycle of the project the better, and the more you test, the more bugs you find. Automated unit testing can be implemented on day one and then you can gradually build your automated test suite. Bugs detected early are a lot cheaper to fix than those discovered later in production or deployment.

With the shift left movement, developers and advanced testers are now empowered to build and run tests. Tools allow users to run functional UI tests for web and desktop applications from within their favorite IDEs. With support for Visual Studio and Java IDEs such as IntelliJ and Eclipse, developers never have to leave the comfort of their ecosystem to validate application quality meaning teams can quickly and easily shift left to deliver software faster.

Select the Right Automated Testing Tool

Selecting an automated testing tool is essential for test automation. There are a lot of automated testing tools on the market, and it is important to choose the automated testing tool that best suits your overall requirements.

Consider these key points when selecting an automated testing tool:

Support for your platforms and technology. Are you testing .Net, C# or WPF applications and on what operating systems? Are you going to test web applications? Do you need support for mobile application testing? Do you work with Android or iOS, or do you work with both operating systems?
Flexibility for testers of all skill levels. Can your QA department write automated test scripts or is there a need for keyword testing?
Feature-rich but also easy to create automated tests. Does the automated testing tool support record and playback test creation as well as manual creation of automated tests; does it include features for implementing checkpoints to verify values, databases, or key functionality of your application?
Create automated tests that are reusable, maintainable, and resistant to changes in the applications UI. Will my automated tests break if my UI changes?

For detailed information about selecting automated testing tools for automated testing, see Selecting Automated Testing Tools.

Divide Your Automated Testing Efforts

Usually, the creation of different tests is based on QA engineers’ skill levels. It is important to identify the level of experience and skills for each of your team members and divide your automated testing efforts accordingly. For instance, writing automated test scripts requires expert knowledge of scripting languages. Thus, in order to perform these tasks, you should have QA engineers that know the script language provided by the automated testing tool.

Some team members may not be versed in writing automated test scripts. These QA engineers may be better at writing test cases. It is better when an automated testing tool has a way to create automated tests that do not require an in-depth knowledge of scripting languages.

You should also collaborate on your automated testing project with other QA engineers in your department. Testing performed by a team is more effective for finding defects and the right automated testing tool allows you to share your projects with several testers.

Create Good, Quality Test Data

Good test data is extremely useful for data-driven testing. The data that should be entered into input fields during an automated test is usually stored in an external file. This data might be read from a database or any other data source like text or XML files, Excel sheets, and database tables. A good automated testing tool actually understands the contents of the data files and iterates over the contents in the automated test. Using external data makes your automated tests reusable and easier to maintain. To add different testing scenarios, the data files can be easily extended with new data without needing to edit the actual automated test.

Typically, you create test data manually and then save it to the desired data storage. However, you will find tools that provide you with the Data Generator that assists you in creating Table variables and Excel files that store test data. This approach lets you generate data of the desired type (integer numbers, strings, boolean values, and so on) and automatically save this data to the specified variable or file. Using this feature, you decrease the time spent on preparing test data for data-driven tests.

Creating test data for your automated tests is boring, but you should invest time and effort into creating data that is well structured. With good test data available, writing automated tests becomes a lot easier. The earlier you create good-quality data, the easier it is to extend existing automated tests along with the application’s development.

Create Automated Tests That Are Resistant to Changes in the UI

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