IF THIS THEN THAT: Social Web's Duct Tape & Tumblr

gbattle:

ifttt is quietly building an arsenal of powerful small tools that are making them the duct tape of the social web.  Just as specific tools like hammers, chisels, saws and APIs are great in the hands of a skilled craftsman/developer, duct tape can fit the bill for connecting anything to anything for the numerous unskilled.  The ifttt repository for Tumblr might be where David & the Tumblr Crew mine for clues/ambassadors as they begin to embrace the developer community to create tools for the masses.  

I use ifttt to work around the inoperable import-posts-from-rss feature of tumblr, for example. I have a blog called Upstreamed which I follow here at stoweboyd.com, and I have set up a ifttt recipe for new posts of non-tumblr blogs I want to follow are posted to Upstreamed. Then the posts show up in my Tumblr stream, as if Tumblr supported the idea of following non-tumblr blogs.

If This Then That: Universal Gasketry

I heard about a service called ifttt.com (If This Then That), that provides an amazing service. It allows a ‘if-then’ sort of integration between common web services, like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and many others.

I used it to do a few things. Most specifically, I set up an account and twiddled thinigs so that I everytime I create a Delicioius bookmark that is tagged ‘blogworthy’ it will publish that bookmark as a Tumblr link post on stoweboyd.com.

Here’s an image of the ‘task’ I created:

Apologies for the faintness of the various parameters above. The tool wizards you through creating tasks, asking you to connect to the various services as needed. I attached to my Delicious account — which I have just started using again — as the ‘trigger’ of the task, choosing the hook of a specific tag. I then opted to post the link to my Tumblr account as the ‘action’, selecting the appropriate ‘add-ins’ — possible parameters — for a link post.

The whole thing was a ten minute exercise.

In order to create a similar arrangement for my underpaidgenius blog required me to create a second ifttt account, because the tool is currently limited to supporting a single Tumblr login per account. But now I can post links to a single stoweboyd Delicious account, and based on two different tags I can direct link posts to either of my Tumblr blogs, which is a feature that Tumblr has not seen fit to offer in their bookmarklet editor. And of course, I now have all my links — posted or non-posted — in one place.

Tasks can be converted to ‘recipes’ which are templates that can be used by other ifttt users (minus your account login info, of course). I created some others, like a recipe that posts a tweet to my Tumblr account if I favorite it.

A very cool bit of gasketry.