Slack as a General Purpose Notification System

In my last post, I mentioned how the one missing piece in my slightly crazy Alexa->Todoist->IFTTT->Notification Shopping List System was being able to open the specific ‘Alexa Shopping List’ project in Todoist when I’m near the local supermarkets.

Looking through the Todoist API, I realised I can generate a link that will open a specific Todoist project e.g. “todoist://project?id=183977037” where the id parameter is the specific project id.

As far as I can tell the only way of finding the project id is my calling the API to get my project details and inspecting the JSON e.g.

$ curl https://todoist.com/API/v7/sync \
    -d token=0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567 \
    -d sync_token='*' \
    -d resource_types='["projects"]'

So now, rather than send an iOS notification from IFTTT, I send a message to Slack containing the Todoist link.

Obviously that means when I get the Slack notification on my phone, I can simply click on the link in the message and go straight to where I want in Todoist.

Happy days!

The idea of using Slack as a universal notification system is really powerful. There are so many easy ways of hooking up applications into Slack (and it’s easy to write your own) and I’ve already got lots of ideas on how I can use this pattern in different ways to send relevant alerts from different services.