Automating my internet life with ifttt. If This Then That

ifttt is a free internet service for automating a lot of stuff you do online. There’s often things that you do repeatedly, and ifttt is there to help. For example, when you write a new blog post, you want to post a link to Twitter and Facebook, and this is something that’s perfect for ifttt to do automatically.

To get started, just sign up to the free service. Then you have to add the channels; Facebook, twitter, Dropbox, Youtube and other services you would use.

Currently these channels are available, with new ones added quite often.

Channels

• Boxcar
• Bufferapp
• Craigslist
• Date & Time
• Delicious
• Diigo
• Dropbox
• Email
• Evernote
• Facebook
• RSS Feed
• ffffound!
• Flickr
• Foursquare
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Reader
• Google Talk
• ifttt
• Instagram
• Instapaper
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• Phone Call
• Pinboard
• Posterous
• Read It Later
• Readability
• SMS
• SoundCloud
• Stocks
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Weather
• WordPress
• YouTube
• Zootools

Receipts

There is receipts for Tasks that other users have done that you can add to your workflow. So you don’t even have to know how to set up a Task. Just pick one already made by someone else.

Make your own Tasks

It’s really easy to make your own Tasks. Let’s make a task that automatically saves any tagged pictures of you on Facebook. Here’s the steps you need.
1. Choose Facebook as your trigger channel.
2. Select “You are tagged in an image”
3. Choose a action channel. In this case Dropbox.
4. Add file from URL
5. Select where you want to save your pictures in Dropbox.
6. Finished!
Now every time someone tags you in a picture, a copy of the image will be saved to your Dropbox folder.

Here are the things I have set up.

• Post new blog post at www.jackenhack.com to Facebook.
• If blogpost on www.jackenhack.com posted, put tweet in buffer
• If RSS article starred, retweet via buffer
• Retweet starred tweets
• Tumblr post to bufferapp
• Email me when a new ifttt channel is announced
• Every time you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, it will be sent to Dropbox
• Post YouTube favorites to Tumblr
• When posting to Vimeo, put it on tumblr blog
• Published flickr photos posted to my blog
• Archive my tweets to a Google Calender
• Save a timeline of facebook statuses to Google Calendar
• Save my instagram pictures to dropbox

All of this is done automatically. Very handy.

This might also interest you:

1. Facebook and Twitter is actually getting fun to use
2. Yohoo! Who’s the man?