Social Media Automation

Instead of just doing the activities this week (I've already made my share of library memes), I thought I'd talk about automation site IFTTT.

I use IFTTT a ton. It lets you create simple If This, Then That recipes that connect different social media sites and web services. It's basically an intermediary between the dozens of web apps and sites out there that lets you automate and customize actions and activities.

An example that I set up recently for Tania was that when she is using her RSS reader Feedly, any time she labels a story "Tumblr" it gets sent to Tumblr as a draft post with a link to the story that she can review later, add some thoughts, and then post.

The most complicated thing I have done was setting up a series of conditions that monitored Twitter, Facebook, and newsmedia for mentions of a local public library and sending everything into an Evernote where everything was automatically tagged. This required a bunch of workarounds--using RSS feeds and Google alerts, I'd have to pull up the recipes to remember all the details--but the result was an index of all of the times that anyone mentioned the library that you could search, add labels, and then create stats and graphs from.

Corentin Lamy CC 3.0

Now I was hoping to illustrate this with a photo of some IFTTT recipes, but all of them seem to be on flickr, which is blocked at work, so instead here is a picture of the band I am listening to right now:

It's Do Make Say Think. A great Toronto post-rock band who are perfect for when you are typing away in the office.

We don't have any of their albums in the catalogue, so maybe try some Broken Social Scene instead.

MORE RAMBLINGS: The default spacing of that image to the left was annoying me: there was no gap between the image and the text to the right of it. Well I was going to drop an old hspace="10" into the table's html to fix that. And that would work, but double check the HTML 5.0 standards since I learned HTML back in the dark ages. As with most style and formatting issues, you should use CSS instead, so I try adding a margin: 0px 10px into the image style. But then I look at he code and see that there is already a margin-left: 1em attribute in there. So I change the left to right and we're solid.