Month: April 2019

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Splunking Yelp Reviews

Awhile ago, I found myself trying to make a decision on which of several restaurants to eat at. They were all highly rated in Yelp, but surely there might be more insights I could pull from their reviews. So I decided to Splunk them!

TL;DR If you want to get straight to the code, go to https://github.com/dmuth/splunk-yelp-reviewsto get started.

Downloading the reviews

“Splunk: See your world. Maybe wish you hadn’t.”

Yelp has an API but, I am sorry to say that it is awful. It will only let you download 3 reviews for any venue. That’s it! What a crime.

So… I had to crawl Yelp venue pages to get reviews. I am not proud of this, but I was left with no other other option.

Python has been my go-to language lately, so I decided to solve the problem of review acquisition with Python. I used the Requests module to fetch the HTML code, and the Beautiful Soup module to extract reviews and page links from the HTML.

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Using Slack to Monitor RSS Feeds

In a previous post, I talked about using NodePing to send downtime notifications to Slack and having those alerts go to your phone. In this post, I’m going to cover a similar concept: using Slack to track one or more RSS feeds and get alerts when a new item is posted to a feed.

To start with, you’ll want to manage your Slack instance and go to the “Apps” section. If the RSS app doesn’t exist, it should be easy enough to add. Once added, it will look like this:

Click on the RSS app, and you’ll see a list of feeds, which will probably be empty:


If you scroll down, you’ll be able to add a feed, and have alerts go to whichever channel you want. For this example, I’m using the lorem-rss feed, which generates a new item every minute:

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