I’ve been looking for an opportunity to learn ActivePieces, an automation tool similar to IFTTT, Power Automate, or Zapier. Recently, I found the perfect use case to explore its capabilities.
This fall, my son is starting at a new school. Like many educational institutions, they use multiple communication channels to keep parents informed. They maintain a news page that’s updated frequently, but it lacks proper organization; there are no individual articles or rolling history. The school simply updates this single page with the latest information.
While I could check the page daily for updates, I thought a little automation project would be more fun!
Setting Up the Infrastructure
I began by installing ActivePieces along with a local instance of ChangeDetection.io, both running via Docker on a Raspberry Pi. The setup process was straightforward, with plenty of documentation available online.
I then configured ChangeDetection to monitor the school’s news page. For those unfamiliar with this tool, ChangeDetection is an application that periodically checks web pages for updates. When changes are detected, it can send notifications or trigger various actions. It’s commonly used for price monitoring and similar applications.
Building the Automation
In my setup, ChangeDetection monitors the school webpage on a regular basis. When it detects changes, it triggers a webhook I created in ActivePieces, sending the UUID of the updated ChangeDetection record.
On the ActivePieces side, I’ve configured a webhook endpoint that receives this UUID. The workflow then makes two API calls back to ChangeDetection: one to retrieve the current version of the page and another to fetch the previous version. This comparison approach becomes important in the next step.
Both versions are stored as variables within the ActivePieces flow for processing.
Just the Facts
Here is where I used generative AI to make the school updates a bit easier to read. Using the “Ask AI” piece in ActivePieces, I construct a prompt that includes both versions of the web page and instructions to write a summary of the differences.
I send this prompt to Anthropic’s Claude API, which returns a concise summary of only the changes. This means I receive just the new information without having to scan through the entire webpage.
Delivering the News
For the final step, I integrated this system with my existing reading tools. I use Feedbin to do most of my online reading. Feedbin is a service that aggregates RSS feeds and email newsletters into a single spot. It provides a dedicated email address for newsletter subscriptions so they don’t clog my inbox.
ActivePieces composes an email containing Claude’s summary along with a direct link to the original page, then sends it to my Feedbin email address. As a result, whenever the school page updates, a new item appears in my Feedbin account with an AI-generated summary of the changes. If I need more detail, I can click through to view the full page.
Wrapping Up
This solution might be somewhat over-engineered - convincing the school to adopt a proper blogging platform might be simpler. However, this project provided an excellent opportunity to explore ActivePieces and kick the tires a bit with a simple automation or dare I say “agent”.