Valve Software recently announced another way to sap money from my wallet. Every day at noon CST a new game will be made available at a deep discount on the Steam online store. You can find out which game is on sale by checking Steam itself or by following @steam_games on twitter. While it’s nice to have this available on twitter, when I’m away from my computer I wanted to have updates pushed to my phone as I knew I’d forget to check and miss some great deals. Unfortunately it’s kind of all or nothing as far as SMS updates from Twitter go and they post quite a few things every day.
I was able to solve this problem with the help of Yahoo Pipes and Twitterfeed. I’ve also made this available on twitter to anyone else that would find it useful. @SteamDailyDeals will update within 30 minutes of the update hitting @steam_games daily.
I used two pre-written Yahoo Pipes to filter just the “Daily Deals” posts from @steam_games. The first turns a Twitter feed into RSS (this functionality used to exist natively on Twitter but has been removed) and the second filters out only the posts that contain “Daily Deals”. To accomplish this I used the Get Twitter RSS pipe to generate an RSS feed and then loaded it into the Feed Filter pipe to remove unwanted entries. I’ve included the finished pipe diagram below.
After I had a working and filtered RSS feed I loaded that into TwitterFeed.com and connected it to my new Twitter account, @SteamDailyDeals. This service will feed any RSS feed into Twitter, checking for new posts every 30 minutes. Since @steam_games only updates their “Daily Deal” once daily checking every 30 minutes seems reasonable enough to me.
After setting up TwitterFeed all I had to do was follow @SteamDailyDeals on twitter and turn on device updates. Now I get just the updates I want delivered to my cell phone daily without the rest of the daily tweets from @steam_games.
