Since 2009, I've been doing a "picture a day" blog for our family. It's gone through many iterations - first iWeb, then Posterous. After those two went by the wayside, I moved to Blogger (where it should've been at first...but that's another blog post). The blog started out just being shared with parents and grandparents via email. Then I began sharing them on social media and wanted an easier way to back up the pictures and text. That's a lot of different places to post. Thanks to If This, Then That (IFTTT), I can now post to one spot and all of that happens automatically. Like knocking over one domino and watching the rest fall down!
Thanks to two IFTTT recpies, when I post to Blogger, the post automatically goes to both Facebook and a copy is sent to Flickr for the picture backup (see below). One post to three places. As I've began using Instagram more, I set up an IFTTT recipe to autopost to Flickr if I used the hashtag #mykids. I typically set up similar ones for special events (#snowdays, #ressesturns1, etc.).
What I began to realize is that sometimes I would have the same picture in Flickr twice: once from the #mykids recipe and once from the blog post. That doesn't always happen, but sometimes I make a #mykids post on Instagram in the morning and then decide to use that picture later in the day. It's not a huge deal because Flickr gives you a terabyte of storage for free (that's a lot), but if I ever get around to organizing my pictures it could be annoying. So the other day I set up a new recipe that if I tagged a picture in Instagram picture with #blog, it automatically creates a new post on my picture a day blog. That starts the dominoes falling!
I won't always start my blog post from Instagram, but it's now possible and I won't end up with two pictures in Flickr.
There are thousands of ways to use IFTTT. If doing a picture a day blog for your family or class, you wouldn't have to use as many recipes as I did. Or you could substitute other recipes. IFTTT would be a great way to get share with parents more of what is going on in your classroom. Setting up recipes to work together gets all of your dominoes to fall the same direction.
Click here for my IFTTT presentation at #neta14.
Thanks to the wonderful world of Twitter, I found this blog post by Ramsey Musallam about creating an "Idea Dump" to Google Drive. The idea is to text yourself ideas as they come up. As an avid Evernote user, I switched the ending to do the exact same thing, only it will add to a note in Evernote.
I encourage you to read Ramsey's post about the "why" behind a recipe like this. Yes, you could just open either of these apps, but sending a text message is much quicker than opening an app and waiting for it to sync.
Feel free to use and share away!
