Incessantly checking Poloniex or Coinmarketcap to see where Steem is, in terms of price, can become not only addictive, but, once over a certain threshold, even toxic. I know that, because I felt this stress, and not only once. So, how to decouple form the stress, but still keep yourself informed?
SMS alerts to the rescue!
In this article I'm going to share how I set up an SMS alert using Zapier. Or, in other words, how I programmed the Internet to do what I want.
A Zapier workflow consists of 3 stages: a trigger, a filter (optional, but useful in our case), and an action. In our case, the trigger is the price of a certain currency, pulled from a certain website (Coinmarketcap), the filter would be the exact value of that currency (what's the value that will activate the action) and the action will be an SMS. The rest of the article assumes that you already have an account on Zapier (it's free).
Step 1: Set up the trigger
After certain a new Zap (how they call it), I am invited to set up the first step. I chose a "Zapier Webhook", which is just a way to interact with various sites.
The webhook has certain actions, I chose "Retrieve Poll" (polling a website and retrieve a certain result). The polling will happen every 15 minutes.
The URL is taken from the Coinmarketcap API, and it returns a JSON containing various information about a certain cryptocurrency (it's the same endpoint I'm using in steem.supply). Here it is, for the lazy ones:
https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/steem/?convert=EUR
The important field from above is the Key parameter (in our case it's not optional). From the entire JSON returned by the request, we're only interested by the price. The JSON key responsible for that is price_usd, write that down in the field, we're going to need it later on.
After each step there's a nice option to test it, which, in this case, actually sends a requests to Coinmarketcap and checks for various stuff (is the URL really there? the site is up? etc).
Step 2: Filtering the values
The filter that we add is going to use another Zapier tool, called "Zapier filter":
From this filter, I chose the option: "Only continue if". I don't need to get an SMS about the price of Steem every 15 minutes.
In the "Edit Options" step, we can add certain conditions. This is a very powerful query builder and you can create some very complex filters with it. I chose only one condition: if price_usd (the Key set up in the trigger) is bigger than $2, then the workflow can continue.
The last step lets you test the filter again.
Step 3 - Sending the SMS
This is the easiest part. You just choose any SMS transport providers, there are many, and I chose ClickSend SMS only because was the most convenient in terms of set up. You may replace it with whatever SMS transport provider you want, provided Zapier has an integration with it).
The rest is very specific to each SMS provider so I didn't include it, let me know in the comments if you want some screenshots for that as well.
There you go. Easy as pie.
(By the way, I always thought baking pies is a very complex and time consuming activity.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):