As I’ve mentioned a million times, there are not enough hours in the day. In the past 2 weeks, I’ve started a new year of teaching and a new grad class, in the midst of watching the countdown to the Healthy Living Summit get shorter and shorter. Things around here are crazy right now, though I’m thinking it’s going to get a lot better in a week or two and really, it’s all good things. As a result, I love products and sites that make my life a little bit easier and save me a little bit of time. If This Then That (IFTTT) is one of those sites.
IFTTT is a way to automate your online life by connecting various services you use. There are 69 available channels including Blogger, Buffer, Craigslist, Dropbox, Email, Evernote, Facebook, Feeds, Feedly, Drive, Instagram, The NY Times, Tumblr, Weather, WordPress and YouTube. You activate the channels by connecting your accounts to IFTTT, then use the channels to create recipes. Recipes follow the formula “if _______________, then _______________”. An example of a recipe would be, if I use a specific tag on an item in Feedly, then share that item on Facebook through Buffer. No need to go to Facebook to share, IFTTT will share for me automatically.
Some great recipes for bloggers:
Though I’ve found IFTTT to be really helpful for blogging, there are also infinite uses for it outside of the blogosphere. Want a text message if it’s raining out so you remember your umbrella? Need emails for a specific Craigslist search? How about a random Wikipedia article to your Feedly so you learn something new daily? IFTTT can do all that, and more. There are thousands of recipes already created by other IFTTT users, or you can create your own to suit your needs.
Want to know more about IFTTT? I’m so excited to be doing a mini-demo at the Healthy Living Summit this Friday. The mini-demo session, which features myself and three other bloggers sharing some of our favorite tools, will take place from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. I hope to see many of you there—if not, check out IFTTT anyway and send me any questions you may have. I can certainly write a follow-up post to this one!
Portions of this post originally appeared on Healthy Living Blogs
So I finally started using IFTTT! While I can see a lot of potential in using it, I’m having a hard time figuring out what exactly it is capable of doing, and what I should be using it for. Did you ever write a follow up post to this one (after your HLS presentation last year)?
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