DEV.to Competition Tracker: Instant Notifications & Content Analysis with n8n Bright Data

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n8n and Bright Challenge: Unstoppable Workflow

This is a submission for the AI Agents Challenge powered by n8n and Bright Data

What I Built

A Content-Curator Bot that wakes up on a schedule, scrapes any public API or web page, groups fresh articles by author, and ships neatly-formatted summaries straight to Telegram—all without a single line of backend code

Demo

Video Link

n8n Workflow

Workflow JSON is shared as a GitHub Gist here

Technical Implementation

Schedule Trigger – kicks off the flow at the cadence you choose (hourly, daily, etc.).
Bright Data Web Unlocker – pulls raw JSON or HTML from any URL while bypassing rate-limits and bot protection.
Edit Fields → HTTP Request – maps each target URL into a separate Bright Data API call for parallel fetching.
HTML Extract – isolates just the article fields we need (title, author, link).
Code Node #1 (Grouping) – JavaScript merges every item and builds a dictionary like { "Author": [posts…] }.

const items = $input.all();
const byUsername = {};
for (const item of items) {
  const username = item.json.username[0];
  if (!byUsername[username]) byUsername[username] = [];
  byUsername[username].push({ title: item.json.title });
}
return [{ json: { byUsername } }];

Code Node #2 (Markdown Builder) – converts that dictionary into several Telegram-ready markdown blocks, one per author.

const groupedData = $input.first().json.byUsername;
return Object.entries(groupedData).map(([user, posts]) => ({
  json: { markdown: `## ${user}\n` + posts.map((p,i)=>`${i+1}. ${p.title}`).join('\n') }
}));

Telegram “Send Message” – n8n automatically iterates over the array and delivers each markdown card to your chat.

Bright Data Verified Node

The Verified Node handles:
Residential proxies to avoid IP blocks.
Automatic JavaScript rendering so single-page apps load correctly.
Session management for reliable pagination.

Journey

I began with a simple scraper but soon needed:

Author-level grouping so teammates only get their own mentions.
Rate-limit resilience on news APIs—Bright Data solved that instantly.
Markdown summaries for quick Telegram consumption.

n8n’s visual builder let me bolt each piece on in minutes, replace clunky scripts with clean nodes, and iterate until the bot felt production-ready. Now the team stays informed without ever opening a browser.

Top comments (4)

Abhi nandan • Sep 3

@ben @jess Hey guys, created a DEV.to Competition Tracker: Instant Notifications & Content Analysis with n8n Bright Data, I will enhance it further with AI analysis and project summary, Judges can use it for upcoming dev.to challenges instead of manual process of going through each post