Hourly Weather + Hacker News Email Briefing with OpenWeatherMap & Gmail

Hourly Weather + Hacker News Email Briefing (OpenWeatherMap & Gmail)

Get an automated, developer-style HTML briefing every hour: current weather (from OpenWeatherMap), a fresh dad joke (from icanhazdadjoke), and the top 5 Hacker News stories—delivered directly to your inbox via Gmail, with results logged to Google Sheets.

What this workflow does

• Runs hourly using a scheduled trigger so the briefing is generated automatically without manual effort.
• Fetches live content by pulling:
  • Weather details for Kolkata (configurable) from OpenWeatherMap
  • A random dad joke from icanhazdadjoke.com
  • Top front-page stories from Hacker News
• Merges and formats all responses inside a Code node to extract temperatures, joke text, and the news titles/authors.
• Builds an HTML email using a Set node with monospace-style formatting for a clean, “briefing” look.
• Sends the email to your specified recipient using Gmail OAuth2 credentials.
• Logs to Google Sheets by appending a new row with a timestamp, weather status, the joke, and the top news items.

Use cases

• SaaS operators who want a lightweight hourly “status + news” inbox update.
• Automation engineers building n8n workflows that combine multiple public APIs and email delivery.
• Developers who track local weather and Hacker News insights without opening separate sites.

Technical details

• Scheduled trigger to run every hour
• HTTP Request calls for OpenWeatherMap, icanhazdadjoke, and Hacker News
• Code node for parsing/merging: temperatures, joke, and news titles/authors
• Set node to generate the HTML email body
• Gmail node (OAuth2) to send the briefing
• Google Sheets logging via OAuth2: append rows with TIMESTAMP, WEATHER STATUS, J… (and the top news fields)