The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog


Script Kitty

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We wanted to adopt a kitten from the Oregon Humane Society. In these days of the pandemic, their adoption process has changed and you’re only allowed to apply online. So we checked their website regularly. That’s when we noticed that demand is very high these days so the window to apply was very short. New kittens would get posted but by the time we noticed and applied, they would already have been spoken for. This went on for a week or so.

So I did what any programmer might do, I implemented a script to detect when new kittens are posted. It was run every five minutes for about three weeks. Now it has been retired with the arrival of Mr. Momo a few weeks ago.

The script flow is pretty straightforward:

It was loaded as a launchd service on my always-on Mac, which I manage using LaunchControl.app.

Here’s the script in its entirety:

😻