If this then that

I love If this then that. Connecting apps together and making them work for you. The concept is so simple yet so powerful.

With IFTTT you make “recipes” which are made from “channels” which are basically all of your favourite apps from Twitter to Facebook, Instagram to YouTube.

A recipe says “if (something happens in this channel - the "this”) then (do something in this channel - the “that”)“.

For example: "if (a new entry appears in an RSS feed) then (tweet the link to twitter)”. Cool eh?

I use the recipe above to look at the Sheffield United BBC news feed and automatically tweet the page from my @sufc twitter account when a new item is added.

IFTTT and Trello #

I love Trello, but sadly as it stands there isn’t a Trello channel (come on guys sort it out!)

One area we use Trello is planning our marketing tweets. We’ve got an ever growing list of tweet ideas in there which eventually make it in to the “Tweets to Send” list and then the “Sent” list. We were then using Hootsuite to schedule our tweets to be sent.

But wouldn’t it be cool if we could automatically send the tweets from the “Tweets to Send” list using IFTTT?

Sadly with no Trello channel, we needed an alternative. Step up the RSS channel.

The RSS channel can fire when new items are published to a feed. So a few hours of ASP.NET MVC magic later and we now have an RSS feed looking at the “Tweets to Send” Trello list, using the card Due Date to control when the item gets published.

So now, within 15 minutes of the due date passing on a card, the tweet is sent :-)