How To: Exploit ifttt’s channels in your own box of Web Tools

If you’re anything like me, you use a few web tools very regularly, several of them on a regular basis, many on an ‘if I get the time’ arrangement, and quite a lot more on the ‘very rare’ / ‘do I still have an account with you?’ status.

And keeping up to date with them all can be horrendous. I first joined LinkedIn two and a half years ago. Filled in a bit of a profile, and then promptly forgot about it, as my time online was more taken up with facebook, twitter, and the neverending emails. I dabbled with flickr for a while, too – and YouTube was in the mix as well – but I never really got around to playing with these tools and utilizing them to their fullest potential. And then just keeping my current information up-to-date with them became a challenge in itself, as I had too many tools, all with different usernames and passwords – it just got ridiculous.

Source: thecreativemaven.net via Alicia on Pinterest

Enter a new tool – albeit one with a difference. This knight in shining amour promises to help keep all these other tools in order, up-to-date, and completing tasks in an automated fashion. Yes, I’m talking about ifttt.

Check out their channels. Just this week, they’ve added Storify and Buzzfeed. Not bad!!! (Still waiting for google plus to become an ‘action’ channel rather than just a ‘trigger’ feed, but apparently that’s on the cards…) As we’ve explored already, ifttt lets you create tasks that literally program actions within and between your tools. These are outlined below:

Creating a task within a channel

With this type of task, you use a trigger within one channel to program another action within that same channel. For example, I use ifttt to send a tweet greeting new twitter followers. I also use ifttt to send any unread emails from my activated gmail account (which I only check when I need to) to the gmail account that I check all the time (which isn’t yet activated with ifttt because they don’t yet have the functionality for multiple channels. Again – this is coming!)

Creating a task between channels

Perfect for keeping your online presence consistent across multiple tools. Want your profile picture consistent across twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, WordPress, etc? Program a few ifttt tasks to do this for you whenever you change it. And not just images, but updates, information, etc etc.

Also great when you want to keep tabs on your information – favourite something on Google Reader and it automatically syncs to Evernote. Send photos from Instrgram to your DropBox. The list is pretty much endless.

Exploiting iftt’s channels

So – where to from here? HOW, exactly, can you exploit these channels? When the options are so numerous?! My suggestions are below:

1. Start with the tool – or channel – that you work with the most. Using it as your ‘this’ channel, look at the possible triggers you could use – both within and between your channels. Remember, these ‘trigger options’ vary between channels. Where some channels only have a small number of trigger actions, some have close to a dozen.
2. Create tasks which you know will be useful to you. Don’t bother wasting time creating tasks that you’ll only use once-in-a-blue-moon.
3. Once you’ve created tasks using this channel’s ‘trigger’ actions, think about what tasks you can create where this channel is used for the ‘action’ part of the task. Explore these options.
4. Again, create these tasks. Exploit the power of ifttt!
5. Now, move onto the channel that you work with the next most. Again, start exploring its ‘trigger options’, then when these are exhausted, look at its ‘action options’. Chances are, you’ll surprise yourself with tasks that you can come up with to make your life easier. Then try the next channel, and the next, and so on.
6. Once you have these tasks set up, monitor them on a regular basis. Check which ones are triggered, which ones aren’t, and how often. Some tasks may need to be tweaked. Some, time-specific tasks, may need to be turned ‘off’, and then turned back ‘on’ again at another time. Either way, your dashboard can become an excellent way for you to monitor your own usage of your tools – or even to check just how popular you’re getting on twitter!

So – over to you. Is there anything I’ve missed? Do you have any ideas on exploiting ifttt’s channels to harness the Internet’s capabilities for making your own life easier? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

How To: Make the most of ifttt’s book of recipes

This post is the third in a series on how to get started with ifttt.com – I’ve already covered: joining, understanding your dashboard, creating a task, and I’ve quickly outlined the two other tabs: Recipes; and Channels. ifttt.com - a genius little program that puts the Internet to work for you – stands for ‘if this then that’, and it allows users to program tasks both within, and between, their online accounts.
I also mentioned that this was simply ‘scratching the surface’, as it were. Today, we’ll look some more into their ‘Recipes’ book.

Life is short. Why reinvent the wheel when you don’t have to? When any of your ‘tasks’ would undoubtedly be similar to tasks created by dozens – if not hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands – of other people! It just makes sense. I guess the ifttt team obviously thought so too, because they decided to allow users to add their tasks into a centralized database of tasks, which are then called ‘Recipes’. So how does it work?

Source: Uploaded by user via littlespace on Pinterest

Click on the ‘Recipes’ tab, top right, and you’ll see 20 recipes. Each is a task that has been shared by its creator. (Point to note: when you create a task, it is not automatically added into this publicly accessible database of tasks. Rather, to add your task/s to the ifttt book of recipes, you need to do this from your dashboard. More on this in a minute…)
Each of these 20 recipes, visible on the ‘Recipes’ page, shows the description given to it by its creator, as well as logos showing the channels (places online) used for trigger (the ‘this’ variable) and action (the ‘that’ variable).

These 20 recipes are sorted by ‘What’s Hot’, however the options to sort by ‘latest’ and ‘most recent’ are also available. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to click through more pages – at the time of writing there are 768 of these; when I first started taking screenshots, late last week, there were 745 pages. Obviously, the word is spreading, and quite quickly too, in spite of the fact that it’s still only in Beta.
With this many recipes, and probably many more to come, the ifttt team have also enabled filtering by channel. This helps significantly when you’re looking for a recipe to ‘make’. (Copy a task created by someone else.)

How to make (copy) a recipe
Firstly, find a recipe you like. Maybe it’s “When Facebook profile picture changes, update Twitter profile picture”. Click into the recipe to make it yourself.
Secondly, add the missing ‘ingredients’. (Sticking to their cooking metaphor is both clever and quirky, don’t you think?) By ‘ingredients’, they mean account information for the trigger and action channels, in case you haven’t uploaded them already. In the screenshot above, you can see I haven’t yet activated my facebook channel. If you’ve already added these channels, it’s even simpler!
Thirdly, insert your own custom messages – or not – as required.
Finally, click on ‘create task’. Done!

How to add a recipe to the ifttt Recipe Book
Firstly, on your dashboard, choose the task you’d like to add to their database. (Quick thought – have a quick scroll through some of the pages first, to see if it’s there already. There’s no sense in cluttering up the database with two, three, a half-dozen or more, identical recipes. Not only is it redundant; it makes it harder from those searching for the recipe they want.)
Secondly, use the ‘bowl and spoon’ icon to transform your task into a recipe for others to see, and copy for themselves if they want to. And just in case you’re worried about security, it’s only the combination of trigger /action choices that others are copying. They do not have access to the account information that you uploaded.
So that’s it. How to copy other’s recipes for yourself, and upload your own recipes so that others can benefit from your tasks.

And now it’s over to you. Do you have a task or two that would make a great recipe? Which recipes have you used? Is there a recipe that you’d like to see in there?

Weekly review

Source: myrecipes.com via Cristina on Pinterest

This week has been quite a huge one. Not only did the St Paul’s poster campaign finish at Morayfield Shopping Centre, we also ran our flyer campaign through the Australia Post, to several thousand homes in and around the Caboolture area. Unfortunately, non-stop rain – and at times the odd storm or two – prevented the brick wall at the front of the school from being painted, so even though the 3D signage was manufactured and ready for installation on Friday, unfortunately that’ll have to wait until the weather clears. Meaning that it won’t be installed before children return next week. Oh well. Can’t win them all. Friday also saw several last-minute phone calls organising a newspaper ad campaign in two of the  local newspapers, so that’ll be some designing work to get stuck into, this weekend!

At St James in Hervey Bay students return on the 30th, so that leaves one more week for the newspaper enrolment campaign, which commenced last week, to take effect. Even so, there’s been quite a surprising amount of activity on the College’s facebok page, considering the term hasn’t yet commenced. But it’s great to see a school community so involved in engaging with their school through social media.

Online, both the St Paul’s website, the St James website, and GoodOldTalk have had tweaking done, ready for the explosion of activity over the next week or so. In particular, the newly created ‘Admin blogs’ on the St Paul’s website will be a marked difference to the amount of up-to-the-minute content on their website! The Bloxham Marketing website has also had a bit of a facelift, with a daily blog joining the regular tweets and facebook page updates. This week, posts focused on How To’s – firstly, how to successfully plan for writing a blog; and then, after my discovery of www.ifttt.com, an introduction of same and a How To – get started with ifttt in 5 easy steps. Alexander Tibbets, the “go-to guy at ifttt” continued to amaze me with exceptional customer service, topped off with an invitation to connect on LinkedIn. So now one of my 40 connections is one of the creators of ifttt! I impress even myself at times…

All in all, a very productive week. I don’t know about you, but I look forward to seeing what next week brings!