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Pushbutton pipes
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Aha! As part of the ongoing rehabilitation of my Google Reader, I have just done two thing:

  1. Pruned my feeds significantly, dropping many (many!) that were long-dead. The RSS snake sheds its skin.
  2. Essentially “reprogrammed” the star to save the image from a post to Dropbox. This is super-cool, because at least half of my a-ha moments in Google Reader come from great (or weird) images, but I find Google Reader itself a totally lame archival system. (Also, I just really like to browse images in the OS X Finder—it’s so fast and fluid.)

How did I do that second part? It’s thanks to ifttt—read: if this, then that—a site that my polymath colleague Isaac turned me on to this week. Think of it as Yahoo! Pipes with a much simpler, more declarative interface. Or, if that analogy is impenetrable, think of it as a way to wire up different tools on the web, so that (for instance) when you post a new photo to Instagram, ifttt can also archive it to Dropbox, or when Yahoo! Weather calls for rain, ifttt can send you a text message.

My task recipe is here—you’ll have to be logged in to ifttt to see it.

Ah, but, I’m just remembering now that the site isn’t wide-open yet: so if you’re interested and think you might actually monkey with it, drop a comment here. I’ll send invites to the first three.

10 comments

I’m in!

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I’m game; saw ifttt rec’d by somebody else a couple of days ago, too.

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Aaron says…

I’d love to try it.

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Ben says…

I’m more curious about which feeds you subscribe to. Would you be willing to share some of the highlights?

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Hey Ben: hmm… I wish there was a way to simply make your whole Google Reader public. I know it’s possible to export an OPML file, but that seems cumbersome & hard for others (like you) to inspect.

I’ll see if I can figure out a good way to share en masse… minus the secret feeds of course 😉

Damn, bad timing. Last week I pulled out all my starred items from Google Reader and converted them into bookmarks (which is a lame archival system, as well). I had to use two greasemonkey scripts “Google Reader All Starred” and “Google Reader Kill Stars”.

If only I knew about ifttt ten days ago.

BTW, Robin, that ifttt link is already 404’d. Odd, I was able to create an account there and I am saying this being log in and stuff. What gives? I am really intrigued about your task and I would like to learn about it.

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Thomas says…

Anyone else getting a 404 on the ifttt?

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Thomas says…

I’ve got some invites as well and glad to share.

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Whoops! Didn’t realize you have to explicitly transform tasks into recipes. Just did; it’s now here. I’ll update the post, too…

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An invite to ifttt would be much appreciated. I’ve never given up my RSS feeds. They make my morning newspaper.

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