I'm surprised I still haven't talking about this great service called ifttt (for "if this then that"). What it essentially does is automatically act upon some events that happens through one of their channels. You select a channel that has a trigger, and a channel that has an action, and link the two together in what is called a recipe.
If you looked at the channel list, you'll see that it supports many things, from the basics like email, SMS, phone, time or RSS feeds, to crazier things like Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and more. Users already shared their own recipes, so you can look at them to get some inspiration of what you can do. Want to auto-post Instagram photos to Facebook? Create a new public bookmark on bitly for each link you post in Twitter? Auto-save posts from a blog you like to Instapaper, Pocket or Readability for future reading? Automatically download songs you marked as favourite on Soundcloud to your Google Drive? Get an email each time a new posting on Craiglist matches a specific search?
Essentially, "ifttt" automates the Internet for you. So stop playing with curl in your Perl script on your Linux server, and let ifttt take care of that for you.
Published on September 7, 2012 at 20:12 EDT
Older post: My Server in the Cloud
Newer post: Super Hexagon and McPixel