I have been thinking it’s too much work connecting to AWS. Yet many people want to do relatively simple things like write to spreadsheet or send an email. Connecting to AWS only part 1 or quite a long journey, and many people cannot make it that far. Firebase is not help for these kinds of things either.
So I think I have a much simpler approach to sending emails and writing to spreadsheets by integrating with Zapier.
With the notebook function createTrigger contained in
https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/zapier
You can use the Endpoint Services app to receive triggers from the notebook and connect it to lots of different places (Twitter, Email, Google Docs, SMS). Endpoint Services is private ATM, but you can gain access here:
https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/123889/486258a91f4b504a0b025cb085077318
I need help testing it. I cannot publish it to Zapier unless I have two more users.
I tried really hard to simplify the auth story. There is no login required. You generate a public and secret key. The public key is saved in the notebook in the createTrigger argument. Then the secret key is used to create the connection in Zapier. Only the secret key holder can receive trigger payloads so data remains private. I think that is as simple as possible whilst still having a safe default experience.
The Zapier free tier is 100 events per months, which is ok I think! I was shocked how easy it was to send an email, took about 15 minutes to setup:-
Please please try it out. I am pretty impressed with how many UX tweaks Zapier has, every step of integration has checks and balances its very good at finding issues and mistakes early. So I think it’s as usable as possible. Let me know if anything seems out of place or if you find kinks in the instructions.