More IFTTT Tasks
February 18th, 2012
I’ve been trying to read more articles by designer and writers, I’ve been trying to catch a lot of content that would otherwise pass me by. Twitter has always been my main source of finding articles, free fonts and icons, code examples, WordPress plugins and anything else a freelance website designer might be interested in. There are limited hours in the day, and I can’t sit and watch my Twitter stream all day long – a shame, I know.
Following on from my post about IFTTT and The Inflatable House, I thought I’d write about some of the tasks I have set up on IFTTT that help me consume all this great content, without it taking up my working hours.
Starred Tweets
These are tweets that I see with a link that I want to check out later, usually downloads such as free fonts, icons or vectors – you know the kind. Starring a tweet is quick and an email is something I can look at later.
Starred Reader Posts to Read It Later
For years I’ve struggled with RSS, I’ve never found a way of remembering to check my feeds and the unread number in Google Reader would leap up and up every time I checked in — which wasn’t very often. Recently I’ve discovered Flipboard on the iPhone and I’m ever so slightly addicted, I use it to check my RSS feeds and being able to star an item for later use is easy. This starred item then gets picked up by IFTTT and sent to another app / service I’ve started to use, Read It Later. This is for articles and blog posts that need to be read, not clicked on and downloaded or viewed, so Read It Later on the iPhone is perfect – it’s like an edited RSS feed list, one whose numbers don’t escalate too much.
There’s more…
I also use IFTTT to take care of a few more things on the Internet for me.
- Tweet about new uploads to Flickr. The only downside on this one is if I upload a batch of photos or video, IFTTT creates one tweet for every upload – which can result in a large number of tweets all in one go.
- Tweet a link to new blog posts. Once this gets published, IFTTT will create and post a tweet. I used to use TwitterFeed – but now that’s no longer needed.
- LastFM favourites to Twitter. Just a new tweet every time I favourite a new track on LastFM.
- Delicious links to Twitter. Before Delicious changed hands, and when I was using FireFox, the Delicious extension used to Tweet new links that I added to Delicious – that’s all changed. So now after a create a new Delicious link, IFTTT picks that up and tweets about it.
IFTTT is a great service and there’s plenty of channels I haven’t yet explored – Dropbox and Evernote being two of them. Channels are being added to by the developers and there’s a couple that I’d love to see added to the list, CloudApp being one of them – it would be great to have the links within tweets that IFTTT creates include my own short domain with the stats that come along with it.
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