If you’ve seen more activity than usual on MyKitchenSync this weekend, it’s because I have been playing around with some great apps designed to make sharing of stories simpler.
When I am scrolling through my Twitter feed, I tend to come across loads of links to articles that I just don’t have time to read at that moment, so to save them for later I got into the habit of emailing them to myself. As a resulted, I now have in a big fat inbox full of stuff that I find cumbersome to collate or share.
Luckily it turns out there’s an app for that and it’s
called
,
which
stands for
“
If This Then That
”
(I SOO wanted to drop a comma in there!). D
esigned
for both Mac and iOS devices, it
works on a very simple premise: you do one thing on a popular app and it triggers an action to happen in another one. These triggers are called ‘recipes' and yes, I’ve been busy cooking them up all weekend. (It just so happens I’ve had the sniffles, so this was a productive couple of days in bed with my Lemsip. Honest!)
One little recipe I put together is turning into a real life-hack as it is my answer to all that hassle of emailing myself those tweets. By clicking ‘Favourite’ on a tweet containing a link to an article,
IFTTT
automatically adds that linked article to my Reading list in an app called ‘
’. (I could also have used
, but I prefer the layout of this app.) Later, when I open
Readability
on any of my devices, my Twitter-discovered article is
beautifully formatted and
sitting in the queue waiting for my reading pleasure.
That got me thinking; what if I could share some of these stories to my blog so you could read them too?...
Yep, you guessed it,
IFTTT
had a recipe for that as well. A few minutes of tweaking and now I can
automatically generate a blog post
by simply clicking ‘Favourite’ on any story in my
Readability
list.
The post is published
with the title of the article in the heading, together with an excerpt and the link in the body of the post.
It took a couple of attempts to correct the formatting and to add in some wording to let the reader know
it is automatically generated
.
By communicating that my post is formatted
automatically
, I am giving myself a little room to manoeuvre if it doesn’t look right at first glance.
Of course, this does not replace the task of actually writing for a blog. And I certainly wouldn't advocate this as a TOTAL answer to blogging or building your community, but I do think that curating and sharing stories of interest more regularly will help to keep subscribers interested in my blog over the longer term.
Let me know what you think about this approach, and if you want more help in creating a similar workflow for your blog, just post a comment and I will put together a more technical post with all the steps required.
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