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How to get a daily Nancy comic in your Slack

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I love the new Nancy comics, and I love having them delivered automatically to me. For a while, I used a pirate RSS feed someone made that listed each day’s comic, which could easily be piped into any RSS reader (Slack consumes RSS, so that’s how I started). But then the feed came to a crashing halt (probably a takedown notice?).

Eventually I realized you can read Nancy without any RSS, since it comes out every day and the URLs follow a predictable pattern in the URL itself. I set out to automate this without code using Zapier.

(This requires a paid Zapier account, since I use a three-step process)

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Step 1 is a scheduler that runs at 1am every night.

Step 2 is a formatter that takes the full date and modifies it to the format year/month/day/

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Step 3 takes that formatted date and adds the Nancy comics URL, then sends that URL into a Slack channel as a new message. Slack automatically “unfurls” the URL, which displays the comic in Slack (bonus: you can click it to expand without leaving the app).

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The end result is the screenshot of the channel you see at the top of this post. Daily new Nancy comics, in your Slack, automatically.

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