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Caveat: IFTTT has been in a battle with a few of its services for using the developers it relies on and making them create custom APIs that IFTTT claims all rights to.
As an aspiring developer, this angers me. But there is no real alternative. Part of my workflow was Pinboard but IFTTT is sunsetting the Pinboard service because the Pinboard dev has integrity and wishes to retain the rights to his intellectual property.
With this said, I still use it as it is key to my workflow.
The above caveat aside, IFTTT remains a significant tool in home and web service automation. It is the glue to the Internet of Things and remains an important part of many workflows, including my own.
I was asked on Twitter to list some of my favorite recipes. So I am listing them below with a little description.
This is so I can keep up with issues on my GitHub repos and when the issues first were reported.
This is for my reading workflow, inspired in part by Mike Vardy on the Productivityist Podcast. Interesting articles I’d like to write about I star in Reeder, which is hooked up to Feedly and automatically added to an Instapaper folder called To write. I would have archived those articles for safe keeping in Pinboard but….
This is a way for me to archive ideas and cards from an important Trello Board for various projects. It will append every card to one document instead of creating new ones with each card created.
I love Goodreads. I am a voracious reader of books and I need some way to share and keep track of what I am reading. I have calibre for ebooks and Book Collector for paperbacks, hardbacks, and ebooks but I like the Goodreads challenges and the ability to review books, which I can then sync to my calibre library. This is a way to keep track of my Goodreads habits and updates.
This is a way for me to push highlights of important talking points from Instapaper to my computer to add to Notes.app and then write about those points. Pushbullet is an excellent app for this. I am starting to use DeskConnect for more file exchanges but DeskConnect does not have IFTTT integration, nor should they.
I use this recipe to keep a log of my Code Newbie in Pittsburgh posts in Day One. Day One is my journaling app of choice. They just opened up to the IFTTT platform which I had been waiting a long time for. I have a myriad of recipes for Day One but this is one of the more important ones.
I use RescueTime menubar app to keep track of my productivity and I pay for the Premium account, which to me, is worth it. I can start a FocusTime session, which blocks my access to whatever site I deem very distracting in RescueTime for whatever time I want with an IFTTT recipe that turns it on when I search my calendar for a specific event. When I complete the event, I check it off in Todoist and it stops the FocusTime Session, even if time isn’t up.
This is the recipe I mentioned above.
And lastly, this is a recipe I use to post my Code Newbie in Pittsburgh posts to Pinterest. They say Pinterest is a good marketing tool and I did have some success on one of my posts there. Need to have good enough graphics to entice and my blog is so geeky I am sure it doesn’t appeal to the moms on Pinterest.
So these are my recipes. What are your favorites?
Update 4/2/16:
Linden Tibbets, CEO of IFTTT, responded to the backlash the decision to sunset Pinboard caused. They are keeping Pinboard on IFTTT and helping the developer transition. They cleared up their ToS, but the damage is done. Developers have great memories and are automatically cynical. This won’t be forgotten, by me, as a new developer, or any other developer watching this.
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