IFTTT – automating your digital life

We tend to spend a lot of time online – learning, reading, posting, sharing.  Fortunately, there are ways to gain efficiencies by leveraging tools such as IFTTT.

What is IFTTT

IFTTT is a web-based tool that leverages APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) from other online services and performs actions based on them.  If a trigger happens, then the service performs another action. 

IFTTT leverages channels (sites or information) that have either triggers (something that makes them start an action on that channel) or actions (things that are done on that channel).  Channels include readily available information such as weather and stock prices as well as social media sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn.  Depending on the channel selected, a variety of actions can be performed.

Your IFTTT commands are called recipes.  They can be as simple as (and really not much more complex than):

If (the current weather changes to rain) then (e-mail me)

Fortunately, there are many publicly available, shared recipes that you can leverage or use as the basis for your own (if you don’t want to start from scratch).

How do I use IFTTT

I am, by no means, an expert user of IFTTT.  However, I have found it to be extremely helpful in simplifying some tasks for me.  I find it comparable to the way that online bill pay works through my bank.  Is it difficult to write a check and put it in the mail?  No.  However, if a service will automatically do it for me, why would I spend my time on that task?

My two primary recipes are related to blogs.  The first helps me with this blog by tweeting on my behalf when I make a new blog post.  When a new item is detected in the RSS feed for my site, a new tweet is composed that of the following text and field information: My new blog post: [post title] at [url].

The RSS feed channel allows you to grab information such as the title, url, author, image used, dates, etc as ingredients of the action – in this case, the tweet.

The second recipe I use takes information I star in Google Reader and adds it to my ‘read later’ section on Instapaper.  Essentially, this allows me to identify posts in my RSS reader (whether I’m on my phone, tablet, or computer) and download them to Instapaper to allow me to read them offline (or at my convenience) without needing to go back into Google Reader.  This recipe was based on one I found in the recipes section that I modified to include the ingredients I wanted to show up in Instapaper. 

Once you get a handle on viewing and editing other’s recipes, it is easy to create your own.  The only thing to remember is that you need to give IFTTT your credentials to access your accounts it needs to leverage.

IFTTT is a simple service that makes working in an online environment a bit more efficient and therefore more enjoyable.