I’ve spent today, around my visit to Granny, making “Barbie’s Dream Alerts” with Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. 😂 (No, I’m not going to call them that. I’m going to call them Calishat Snaps.)

There’s some functionality I’ve always missed in Google Alerts that I decided I wanted in my version, so my Google Alert substitute lets you:

– specify the fields you’re searching on a per-query basis
– include an optional start and/or end date (the alerts are checked daily)
– include an optional alert code that gets included in your alert’s email subject. (The codes in the screenshot are a few of the ones I use in my internal RB queuing system; it’ll be a lot easier for me if I can filter by those codes when reviewing my email.)

Up next: go through the sources available through this API and see if there are any domains that make sense to group together into monitored search spaces. Maybe I can make something specific enough for really general keywords…