Category Archives: Tips

An Awesome Service: If This, Then That

Jan 10

Posted by


I’ve been aware of this service for a while, but today was the first time I spent some serious time with it. If This, Then That (ifttt.com) is a tool that essentially lets you create simple scripts for various Web 2.0 services. Here’s how it works:

  1. You create a “trigger.” When this occurs, your task will run.
  2. You tell it what to do when triggered.

That’s it. It’s super intuitive and easy. Here are some examples I have come up with:

 

Archive Your Tweets and Facebook Statuses

This is something I have been wanting to do for quite a while. Since this data isn’t self-hosted or stored locally, you rely on the company to stay around forever if you want the information you post. These tasks create an archive of everything you post on either service. These each have to be set up separately, but it’s totally worth your time if you ever post anything original on Twitter or Facebook.

Trigger:

  • Twitter > New tweet by you
  • Facebook > New status message by you

For the task, you can choose a number of services to which you might want to archive. I use 2, Evernote and Gmail. Gmail is a great place to store these because the search works so well, but you will need to set up some filters for the incoming emails if you don’t want to get inundated with messages.

Task:

  • Evernote > Create a new note
  • Gmail > Send an email (send this to yourself)

Archive Your Blog Posts

This, like the last one, is because I don’t host my blog myself. This way, I have lots of backup copies of everything I write.

Trigger: WordPress > New blog post by you

Task:

  • Evernote > Create a new note
  • Dropbox > Upload file from URL (this will download the blog post’s HTML file and place it into the folder of your choice on Dropbox)

[blank] Sent You an Email

If you seem to miss emails but always see text messages, you can set this up for people you care the most about.

Trigger: Gmail > New email from

Task: SMS> Send text message to me

 

Well, that’s just about all I have, but I’ll keep you updated as I come up with more uses (I’m sure I will).

Posted in Productivity, Tips

Leave a comment