Internet Triggers working for You
Put the internet to work for you. Actively doing things for you, notifying you, doing chores for you! Imagine these scenarios:
- …being able to have the weather forecast emailed to you — but only if the temperature is going to reach a certain point, or only when there is rain in the forecast
- …getting a text message whenever someone tweets your username
- …whenever you post a Facebook link, automatically tweet it to Twitter as well
- …download all Gmail attachments to your Dropbox account
- …get an instant message when there’s a new book in the “Top 100 Free Kindle Book” list
You just set up a trigger, and then specify an action to match. IFTTT.com handles all this for you! Here’s how.
Trigger-Happy
“If This, Then That”. Or ifttt.com for short. When THIS trigger gets activated, take THAT action.
It’s very simple to get started with ifttt.com. You visit the website, sign up for free, and start creating tasks. A task has a trigger (weather forecast includes snow, your username is mentioned on twitter, someone tags you in a Facebook photo, etc) and an action (email the forecast, send a text message, download photos to Dropbox, etc).
Here you can see some of the tasks I’ve got set up. The are, in order:
- When we post a new entry to this EduCloudComputing blog, the EduCloudComputing Facebook page will get an update to match.
- When there’s lots of wind here, my personal Facebook page gets a status update.
- When Gizmodo has some neat new iPhone apps mentioned in their news feed, I get the list in an email.
There are currently dozens of different triggers, including Facebook tagged-in-a-photo, Twitter-search, timestamp-related, and lots more. There are also dozens of actions, including sync-to-Dropbox, create-an-Evernote-entry, send-text-message and gobs more.
Here’s a close-up of the WordPress-to-Facebook task, in the edit-task interface:
When you edit a task, you often have a few fields you can fill in. Here you can see that {{PostUrl}} is going to be submitted to Facebook as the web-link; in this case it will be a link to the latest EduCloudComputing post here on the blog. Each ‘action’ has its own set of features and functions. Explore!
From the dashboard view you can see your triggers and recipes (a recipe is a trigger that you’ve decided to publish for others to check out). There are thousands of neat recipes that other users have published, be sure to explore the ones that look interesting to you.
When thunderstorms are predicted I get an email like this. Neat!
I’ve got a task set up that sends me an email when there’s rain in the forecast. Here’s what the resulting email looks like — very simple!
It’s an exciting time to be alive, isn’t it?
