How to: Automate things online with IFTTT

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If you’re not familiar, IFTTT is a service that allows you to connect other services together to perform automated actions. It stands for “if this then that” and revolves around only this statement. It is completely free to use and allows user to create task according to personal preferences but if you are lazy enough then you can browse around and find what you could have done manually in Browse section of Recipes. The statement of if this event occurred than do this is generally known as Recipe in IFTTT. Enough of talking and let’s see what this thing is capable of:

Say you want an email notification whenever it is going to rain in your city automatically then what you need to do is:

  • Register yourself at IFTTT and navigate to Browse section.
  • Type “Its going to rain tomorrow, send email” in Search box.

search-rain-mail

  • Result will list down many prebuild recipes, select one of them.
  • It will ask for your email id and your location, click “Use Recipe”. That’s it!

In the above method not only you can email but also send SMS or notification to your iOS device. This is how you can use recipes but some of them will require configuration like:

Say you want to update your twitter profile picture whenever you update Facebook profile picture then:

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  • Search for similar recipe, let us do this for you, and you will be prompted to activate channel before you can use it.
  • Click on Activate and enter your credentials, Facebook and Twitter will ask you to authorize this application to access content and profile. Do it.

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  • Once you do this for both of them click “Use Recipe”. Isn’t this super easy?

Let’s do some more productive task but this time we will create our own Recipe. Yeah, in just 5 minutes we are doing this like a professional. Say you want an email notification every time there is a new post on Softnuke.

  • Click on “Create” in navigation and a page with “ifthisthanthat” will appear.
  • Select “this”, many Trigger channel will list down. Right now we need RSS Feed as a trigger and a Mail Channel to post the update.

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  • Choose “Feed” and it will ask for type of event, select “New feed item”.
  • Input RSS Feed Url “//softnuke.com/feed/” without inverted quotes and create trigger.
  • Now it will ask for what to do once the event is occurred, click “that”.
  • Select “Mail” to send mail to your registered email id.

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  • It will ask for further option, modify it if you want and create trigger and then create recipe.

It is easier than it looks really. There are hundreds of combination you can achieve, some of good combination could be:

 

How to: Backup up your Facebook and Twitter account

Don’t Lose Your Tweets and Miss your Posts. Make Them Permanent

Facebook

Facebook allows you to backup all your data without using any third-party apps.

To do this, click on the drop-down menu next to your name in the top-right corner.

fb-twitter-backupGo to account settings and you will find a link which says “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. Once you click on it, Facebook will tell you what the backup will contain. It includes your photos, wall, posts, messages, chats etc.

Click on “Start My Archive” to begin the process. You will receive an email when your archive is ready for Download. The archive contains an HTML version of your account which you can store locally. Ensure that you save this data carefully.

fb-twitter-backup

Twitter

Twitter is sneaky little blue bird. While you’re happily tweeting away your pearls of wisdom on the micro-blogging site Twitter is busy deleting your old tweets. Yes, only 3,200 of your most recent tweets are available online. Imagine all those dear diary style ramblings, those witty innuendos, those wisecracks all gone! The horror! Fear not, there are several services such as Backupmytweets.com and Tweetbackup.com which will help you preserve all that you hold dear on Twitter. TweetBackup requires you to sign up using Twitter and an email address.

twitter-backup

Oauth will authorize the app and you will be on your way. Go to the export tab on the web UI and you can export your tweets as plain text or HTML.

BackUpMyTweets also works in a similar way except that you need to post an obligatory tweet about the service.