Today I finally went to the effort of setting up an account on IFTTT. For those not in the know, IFTTT stands for “If This Then That” (yeah, that acronym isn’t quite right, but the service works great). Essentially what you can do with this tool is set up various sorts of automation for tasks on the internet, using what IFTTT refers to as a “recipe”. A recipe has a couple of pieces:

1. The trigger. IFTTT supports a fairly robust set of triggers, which are organized into channels (IFTTT has 116 of these, of which I’m using a statistically insignificant minority). Triggers exist for watching RSS feeds for new blog posts, watching email accounts, etc. There are tremendous number of items (which you can check out here).
2. The action. IFTTT supports a large number of actions in the various channels (including posting to facebook and twitter, which is all I’m currently doing, but I expect to be doing more fairly soon).
   Basically all I did was set up IFTTT to watch my blog feed and then post to Twitter and Facebook when IFTTT notices that the feed has been updated).

I spent some time looking for wordpress plugins that would do this work for me, and after a while it hardly seemed worth it to load yet another wordpress plugin (with all the inherent risks of doing so), when I could use a third party application to do the work in the background.