Create Your Own Crypto Portfolio in Notion: Real-Time Updates, No Code!
In my previous post, we’ve created a Node Script that uses CoinGeeko, ApiDeMoedas and the Notion API to update a Notion table with the most recent prices of crypto and foreign currencies.
I’ve been using it that way since last post but as time went by it became a little tiring to always open VisualCode and type “npm start” so a had a few ideas on how to automate this process and I’ll explain them in details in this post.
Agenda:
- 1. Getting prices for crypto and foreign currencies from single source
- 2. Peeking a No-Code tool
- 3. Scheduling to run everyday
1 . Getting prices for crypto/currencies from single source — CoinMarketCap
In the last post we used two different APIs to get Crypto and Foreign Currency quotes, it brought a few complications for maintainability and to understand the whole process. For this tutorial I decided to use a single API service to retrieve all this data and for that we’re using the well known CoinMarketCap API. There’s a little setup you need to go through to get your API Key but it should be pretty straight forward.
After registering your account go to the API section of the website to generate your API Access Key:
Hovering over the left side box will display the API key value and also allow you to copy it to the clipboard when clicking on it, we're gonna use this key in our No-Code tool described below.
A small change in our Notion table will also be necessary to adapt it for CoinMarketCap, instead of having two separate columns for 'Crypto Coin ID' and 'Foreign Currency ID' now we'll have a single column called 'Coin_ID' which holds values as: BTC(Bitcoin), LTC (Litecoin), USD(American Dollar) and any other conversion you might need. That's how your Notion table should look like after this change:
2 . Peeking a No-Code tool — Make/Integromat
I've been using Make for a few months for simple automations of my everyday tasks. It's a pretty simple tool that replaces all the coding needed to integrate across multiple APIs and online services. Most of our work we'll be done here.
If you like the tool and wanna give it a try, you could use the following link to register your account and you'd also be helping me to keep writing posts like this one.
The whole concept behind Make is that each API integration is considered a Module and you can connect as many Modules you'd like to create a chain of events that retrieves data from a source (CoinMarketCap in our case), manipulate this data and finally update a visualization tool (Notion).
There is a total of five Make Modules we need to setup and one Filter Module as well, here is how they should look:
1/6 — Set Base Currency Variable
2/6 — List Notion Currencies from Table
3/3 — Filter for items with valid COIN_ID values
4/6 — Get conversions from CoinMarketCap
5/6 — Update Notion entries with conversions from CoinMarketCap
6/6 — Handle Errors
3 . Scheduling script to run everyday
Clicking on the clock icon of the first Module will pop-up the Schedule Settings menu in which you can select among multiple options how frequent you’d like the scenario to run.
Caveats
If you were using the script of the previous post and don't wanna go through all the process of changing your Notion table and/or register for a CoinMarketCap account I've also re-written the script logic with the same APIs using Make. Let me know in the comments bellow if you need it, I'll be more than happy to share it. Below is what this automation looks like.
Updated
Don't forget to run the first Notion Module (right click it and select "Run this module only") before setting up the following modules and filters, with that you'll be able to see and select properties received from Notion.
Conclusion
The Notion API brings a lot of new possibilities to automate repeating tasks but alone it doesn't help people who are not familiar with programming, that's why Make seems to be a more user friendly tool where pretty much anyone could try their automation ideas at any given time.
