Don't rush things, learn the basics first. Getting ready with n8n
Have you hear already about n8n? probably yes! but you probably got the wrong idea, it’s not only related to AI, it can do a lot of things and before of jumping into it you should play with it a little more so let’s do it in this post
My idea before going into the field of n8n with LLMs it’s to build as many thing as possible (maybe not the best ones for everything adds up)
So after I was doing a side project I thought this may be a good use case to learn more
Case #1
The idea
What happens here is the example of a user going into the detail page of a game which gathers information about the game itself from different sources like
thegamesdb
metacritic
youtube
with these 3 sources I build a simple but useful page for that specific game
The workflow
By itself the workflow it’s quite simple it only does some web scrapping (sorry) and parses information into a JSON then is going to be stored in the database and answer back to the frontend with the JSON.
There are some possible improvements like using the HTML Extractor node instead of doing regex validations to find elements in the HTML with Javascript
Other question to ask myself would be, the validation about if the game exists should be present in the workflow itself or in the frontend?
The end result
At the end I’m able to build this horrible but functional detail page for each of the games that are listed in the site, I could also use the scrapper to build a entire database of games with the entire content of thegamesdb and make some improvements (like adding videos of the metacritic like i’m doing rn)
Case #2
The idea
Idea is super simple, I have some devices/machines that are not running inside my proxmox cluster so what I usually do it’s backup them with n8n into the proxmox (in which I after save that “backup” machine into 3 external disks)
In this case I want to save my Retropie saves since I play some retro games there time to time.
The workflow
It uses a schedule trigger to weekly SSH into the machine, if is able to SSH we send a discord message saying “Backup for [MACHINE] will start” and then execute a command inside that machine (rsync) and answer with the message to discord again.
If is not able to do the backup it will send an alert to discord.
The end result
Having a centralized space to backup everything under proxmox native backup system + proxmox backup server, I don’t have to worry about backups anymore :)
Native
PBS
Conclusion
N8N it’s cool you should learn it (even if you are not going to use it for AI)
To get some ideas you can go into https://n8n.io/workflows/ and start playing with it :)
