I want to use Make to send newly added articles to Pocket to my Airtable database. Getting data formatted from Pocket and into Airtable was easy and works great, it’s just getting it to trigger usefully that I can’t get working.
Solution Attempts
The first setup I tried is to have the “New Item Added to Pocket” trigger get the new data and send it to Airtable. However, the default is to just have that check for new articles every 15 min but that would burn through my 1000 free operations very quickly and I also have many times where I want to send them manually immediately anyway and not wait 15 min. I know I can trigger it from the builder interface with the Run Once button but that’s quite clunky.
I saw the option to make a trigger from an Android button which is great so I can just hit a button real quick when I need it. But, the Pocket data source I used is also a trigger and they can’t both trigger things. There’s a separate Pocket action to get items, however, I didn’t see any way to make sure it only fetches new items, every time I trigger it, it simply copies over all existing items which leads to tons of duplicates.
I also tried to create a separate scenario that triggers from the Android button and then forces the other scenario to run but it required putting a different trigger in the main Pocket → Airtable scenario which had the same problems as early.
Specific Asks
So is there a way to have it so that the trigger is either the Android button OR every day and make sure it only gets new items?
Alternatively, is there a way to have it check for new articles and not use an operation since it doesn’t actually do anything with the data?
In your Scenario, right click on the Pocket module and select “Choose where to Start” and be sure “From now on” is selected. If you have “All” or “Since specific date” selected, then it will likely grab everything every time it runs.
Also, with Pocket, they only support polling and don’t fire webhooks when there’s a change, at least I can’t find anywhere in their documentation where webhooks are supported. That means you’re left with polling - checking periodically for changes.
Between your Pocket module and whatever follows, you can also apply a filter that will prevent the entire Scenario from running if you don’t want it to for certain events. Hope that makes sense!
It still seems to grab everything when I select ‘from now on’ I suspect because the ‘search for data from pocket’ has no concept of the notion of something being ‘new’ so it simply can’t know whether to include it or if it’s already been included.
That’s a fair point about web polling though, I may just have to look into a bookmark saver that supports webhooks and use that instead.
I actually do have a filter to prevent the entire scenario from running and only on certain bookmarks but polling pocket still takes 1 event and with at 15 min between runs it would run through the entire 1000 credits in ~10 days.
Do you have any ideas on how to use the android button trigger to trigger polling pocket though for new items though?
Well now I am a bit confused.
Are you using “Pocket - Watch Items” to trigger your Scenario?
If so, you shouldn’t need to Search for Items, because Watch Items returns the item(s).
Here’s what you could do, it needs two Scenarios:
In your original Scenario, Use a Pocket - Watch Items as a trigger, but change it to On Demand instead of on a schedule.
In the second scenario, there are only two Modules. Use “Android - Watch Button” as the trigger. Follow that with a “Make - Run a Scenario” and have it run your first Scenario.
In this setup, the main scenario only runs when you press the Android button and not every 15 minutes. Pressing the Android button would be the ONLY way to trigger your Scenario.
Optionally, add a third Scenario with two modules - Webhook (or Mailhook) and Make - Run a Scenario. With Webhook, simply visiting the Webhook address in a browser would run the original Pocket Scenario. With Mailhook, sending an email to a special email address given by Pocket will run the Scenario as well.
I don’t know what you’ve got on Android, but on iOS, we can set up a Shortcut to open a URL when an app is open and/or closed.
In this case I would set up a Shortcut to run when I close Pocket, then that would in turn open a Webhook URL, which would run a scenario, then that scenario would run another scenario as I described previously.
This is complicated, but again, Pocket doesn’t seem to have any way to get notified when something is saved, forcing us to poll the service.
Got it! Ya is certainly more confusing than I expected! Still looking into what you said but one thing to note is that I was entirely unable to get the Make - Run a Scenario thing working. I assumed it would have been the simplest possible integration but I could not get it to find my scenario to run, it usually just gave the error: “[403] Permission denied: Forbidden to use token authorization for this organization.” when trying to set it up.
There was a hack I found online where you could use webhooks to trigger other scenarios but this required putting that webhook trigger first in the Pocket saving scenario so I couldn’t use the Pocket New Items trigger which in turn meant it wouldn’t only get new items, it would get a bunch of stuff. I would need it to run the scenario without adding a new trigger to that scenario.
And I’m on Android so I can’t use the shortcuts unfortunately, I’ll look into something else for Android though.
The Make module uses Make API so if you happen to be on the free plan, that may not be available.
You can still use a Webhook to trigger the Scenario, followed by a Pocket Search for Items, but you’d have to keep track of the “Since” field. For that, you can use a Data Store.
Ah, it seems that’s the issue which is… infuriating but thanks for clarifying.
Using the data store is an interesting idea, I’ll take a closer look at that.
I’ve set it up to run every 2 hours during daytime and then when I’m on my computer I can pull the links fairly quickly by opening make and running manually so it is sorta working. I think the core issue is that I simply need to find a bookmark saver that uses webhooks instead of only polling.
but thanks for clarifying.