Tasty recipes with IFTTT.

I first heard of IFTTT when I was trying to resuscitate my presence on Delicious. I had not used Delicious in years and wanted to start over from scratch, so I deleted all my old bookmarks and attempted to upload an HTML file containing all my bookmarked sites. It didn’t work as Delicious was in the process of upgrading to a new version. The help documentation recommended using a service such as IFTTT for importing my bookmarks from another site.

IFTTT [short for If Then This That] is a service that works with existing social networking, file storage and information sites. You can create simple “recipes” that work with these sites as well as set up the triggers that will execute them. An example of this would be setting up a recipe that’s triggered when I save a new bookmark on Diigo. This recipe posts a bookmark of the same site to my account on Delicious. This was what the help documentation on Delicious suggested for importing my bookmarks, but it doesn’t import all of them. Instead it only saves the new ones since creating the recipe.

After exploring IFTTT, I came up with some far more practical uses for it. I found a recipe that automatically posts “Happy New Year” to my Twitter feed at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day. There’s a similar one for automatically posting to my Facebook wall, too. I also have a recipe set up that sends me daily e-mails of the latest weather forecasts for my area.

IFTTT works with WordPress as well. In fact I have a recipe set up to automatically create a photo post when I upload a new photo to Instagram.

There’s so much you can do with IFTTT and I hope these examples give you an idea of what’s possible. This is a seriously cool online tool to play with.