Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Getting Web Services to Work Together with IFTTT

I use way too many web services. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (for some reason), Blogger, Dropbox, Feedly, Instagram, the list goes on and on! Sometimes some of these work really nicely together. Like how everything shares to Facebook with ease. But sometimes you want to do something a little more obscure. I wanted to do better at blogging about my marathon training this fall as a way to help keep myself motivated. But I really didn't want to post every run I did to Facebook. I know that would get annoying FAST! But I do want to post them to my blog. Unfortunately, Runtastic.com does not give me the option for sharing to Blogger, only Facebook, Twitter and Google+. That is where a handy meta service called "If This than That" comes in. ifttt.com is a service that consumes information from a pile of different services where you may have accounts and then does actions with that data on some other service. So this is what I did:

So the tweet from Twitter becomes available as a few template fields for me to place into a blogger post. So now at the end of my run, I can post my run to my twitter account and that will generate a basic post that I can either leave as is, or edit with additional info.

I use IFTTT to do various things like to send me an TXT message every tuesday to remind me to take out the trash or to automatically save a copy of any image someone tags me in on facebook to a folder in my dropbox account. It is a really cool service and is pretty easy to set up. Check it out.

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