If you monitor important websites and require advanced features, tools such as UptimeRobot is the solution for you. However, if you only have a few personal websites and want a simple, customizable, and free alternative for monitoring them, this may be a better option.
In this tutorial, I will guide you through setting up a website monitor using Google Apps Script and Google Sheets. This monitor will periodically check the status of your websites and notify you via email and Google Chat (optional) if any issues are detected.
We’ve featured other website uptime solutions using Google Apps Script, this one is nice because it also includes an optional Google Chat integration allowing to send alerts your preferred Chat Space. Another useful feature, used by a number of paid for uptime monitors, is defining a keyword which must be found in the page. Follow the link to the source post for all the code and instructions on getting started.
In this article I’ll show you how to setup reminder emails that will get sent automatically each day if there are any pending tasks in your spreadsheet. Stay tuned until the end, where I’ll show you an easier way to accomplish this using Coda.
Eric Koleda must be the undisputed master of the Apps Script demo. The ‘random cat’ Add-on, is one of my favourite examples where Eric finds a really simple hook to get you engaged in what can often be a complex project. Eric is now Developer Advocate at Coda and he’s not lost is eye. In this post Eric gives the gift of script with a basic example of how you can handle email notifications from Google Form responses in batches with a timed trigger (cats being replaced for cakes). Eric also shows how a no-code alternative can be accomplished in Coda.
Image credit: Full diagram of invoice automation in Gmail with Document AI and Apps Script – Stéphane Giron
Tired of manually managing your invoices in Gmail? Say goodbye to the hassle and hello to efficiency with Document AI and Apps Script.
There is a lot of buzz around generative AI, but it’s also worth remembering Google have a well established service offer in other forms of AI, the Document AI being one example of this. This post from Stéphane Giron highlight an Apps Script based workflow for analysing invoices attached to Gmail messages using the Document AI. There is a bit to setup in a Cloud project to get this working and as a paid for service costs to consider. Further information on this and all the code you need to get started are included in the source post.
AppSheet is headlined as a no-code platform but this doesn’t mean for developers there aren’t coding opportunities. In this post I’ll be sharing AppSheetApp, a Google Apps Script helper library we’ve made at CTS which makes it easy to use the AppSheet API in your own AppSheet apps. As part of this I’ll highlight how this library has made our AppSheet powered Grab n Go Chromebook loaner solution immediately scalable and data source agnostic.
In this post the worlds of AppSheet and Apps Script collide, the resulting fusion is a library which makes it easier to integrate external data and events into your AppSheet app. This solution hopefully makes it a lot easier for developers and low coders to do more with AppSheet creating the possibility to use one (or a couple) of lines of code to interact with your app and not worry which data source your app is using. This post has more details of how you can get started and an example of the impact its already making with an alternative Grab n Go Chromebook loaner solution I’ve been part of at CTS.
For read-heavy applications that don’t involve components external to Apps Script accessing the cache and don’t exceed the CacheService limits, use CacheService. For write-heavy applications or for when some external parts require access to the same cache, use Spreadsheet App.
An interesting report from Ignacio Lopezosa Serrano on the relative performance of CacheService and SpreadsheetApp for reading/writing data with Google Apps Script. Some surprising results and something I think to be kept in mind is how these tests compare to ‘real world’ conditions. As also pointed out in the post there are some service limitations of CacheService to keep in mind particularly around storage size limits.
If you have ever worked with Google Apps Script (GAS), you may have found yourself in this situation. You want to move some files from some Google service to another, e.g., from Drive to a Google Cloud Storage Bucket. You get the file’s contents using GAS’s built-in service in the form of a Byte array. You pass this byte array to the URLFetchApp.fetch() function in the body.
All is going good and well, but then you notice. Why is it taking 30 seconds to upload a 10MB file? Am I doing something wrong? Is GAS not meant for this?
Don’t panic. I’ve been there, and I decided to take a closer look. Here’s what I found.
In this article Ignacio Lopezosa takes a deep dive into how to handle bytes in Google Apps Script, sharing his journey in finding a solution on how to share (large) files.
During the summer I was asked to help with some video recording for a rugby tournament, but rather than spending hours rewatching footage to find highlights, I quickly threw together some tech to make things a lot easier.
A slick solution that uses a AppSheet app for data collection with Apps Script to cue up video files hosted on Google Drive. The Apps Script code is hosted on GitHub if you’d like to take a peak. Hopefully this example gives you inspiration for your own little projects.
Google Docs is a popular document editor for creating and editing text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. With the use of Google Apps Script, a scripting language for automating tasks in Google Apps, users can enhance their document editing experience by adding custom functionality to Google Docs. One such functionality is the ability to check URLs within a Google Document.
Nice little project that has some useful code snippets/functionality you might find useful in your own projects which extracts and tests hyperlinks included in a Google Doc. The post provides an outline of how the script is setup and lets the user interact via a sidebar. I always find interacting with Google Docs a little daunting, particular parsing the document structure. The post links to a useful gist by Mogsdad (David Bingham) with some basic Google Document utility scripts.
There’s a long standing issue with triggers installed programmatically by other triggers, that was kind of fixed last year, but users are still reporting problems, at least in certain locations (Japan, India and others). The issue in short: triggers installed programmatically would not be created, or fail systematically.
In many cases this affects add-ons (and, to be noted, the issue still persists when testing them, see Testing details); I had a slightly different scenario: a webapp that, when executed (doGet), would install a time based trigger for the user executing the script.
This article provides two solutions to an annoying issue and unlocks many possibilities for programmatically installed triggers.
Image credit: Martin Hawksey (with the help of DALL·E 2)
Think 10x — supercharging your Google Apps Script solutions by directly calling Google Workspace Enterprise APIs.
The Google Apps Script built-in services like SpreadsheetApp, Maps and GmailApp are a great onramp for users with limited coding experience, the flip side is you can find yourself easily getting results but not in the most efficient way. DriveApp is a great example where Google have made it easy to iterate across folders and files, but when you have lots of folders and files it becomes a time consuming process and you hit execution limits.
An alternative approach is using Google Apps Script to make direct calls to the Drive API. The benefits of this approach is you can be more specific in the data you want back and it gives more flexibility with how you call the API, in some cases with the ability to make batch or asynchronous processes.
In this post I highlight a method ideal for scenarios when you want to index larger volumes of My Drive files and folders to a Google Sheet with calls directly to the Drive API. The post includes some sample code you can use which instead is able to reduce a 4 minute runtime to index 10,000 files and folders to one that can complete in under 40 seconds!
