Jan-Lukas Else

Tech, life and everything else

What else can I automate?

Published on 2025-07-20 in 💭 Thoughts

Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/814

Two days ago, I needed a tool for some automation. I want to regularly download a newspaper PDF from a tool provided by my local library. That PDF should be uploaded to my PicoShare instance, and then an email with the link should be sent.

After researching a bit, I found n8n, installed it on my server, and created that workflow. In the end, everything worked.

But since then, my head has been running all the time, thinking about other things to automate. What I have found and implemented so far:

The news ePaper download and upload in question
Discord notification on new emails in my the inbox of my grandmother, so I can quickly delete spam before she sees it (I might try to add AI to take me out of that loop)
A daily news roundup with a feed from my Miniflux account and two other RSS feeds, sending me the 10 most important news stories from the last 24 hours every morning. This is mainly done using the “AI agent” node.
Instead of using a GitHub Action to trigger my daily OneDrive to S3 backup with rclone, I use the SSH node to SSH to my VPS and execute rclone from there.

Only after installing n8n and starting to configure some workflows did I notice I already blogged about that tool in 2021. 😅

But what else can I automate? 🤔 Are you using n8n, Red-Node or some other automation tool and for what?

Tags: Automation, n8n

Interactions & Comments

Gregory Hammond Here's what I'm currently automating: I want to immediately be notified of any new post from a number of RSS feeds, so I have automation send me a notification (to ntfy) giving a description of the post. This way, I can take action right away if I need to.And as well, depending on how you watch TV and movies, there are ways to be notified when they are available to watch. And again can be notified to ntfy. Of course this can be used legally, and I'm certain there are not so legal ways as well.
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