Aha! As part of the ongoing rehabilitation of my Google Reader, I have just done two thing:
- Pruned my feeds significantly, dropping many (many!) that were long-dead. The RSS snake sheds its skin.
- 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!
I’m game; saw ifttt rec’d by somebody else a couple of days ago, too.
I’d love to try it.
I’m more curious about which feeds you subscribe to. Would you be willing to share some of the highlights?
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.
Anyone else getting a 404 on the ifttt?
I’ve got some invites as well and glad to share.
Whoops! Didn’t realize you have to explicitly transform tasks into recipes. Just did; it’s now here. I’ll update the post, too…
An invite to ifttt would be much appreciated. I’ve never given up my RSS feeds. They make my morning newspaper.