I often find myself checking various blogs and websites for new articles they may have posted. Manually doing this for every website takes time, not to mention it's boring as hell. Luckily there are better ways to do this. How about a quick and dirty solution to email you a notification whenever Appbite.com publishes a new article? The same solution can be applied to almost any web blog, so keep on reading...
It's time to put the internet to work for you!
We're going to be using a free online tool called IFTTT (pronounced like "gift" without the "g"). IFTTT comes from If This Then That and is a dead-easy tool to create powerful connections between various online services, called channels. These connections are known in the IFTTT community as recipes and they always involve two services (this and that): a trigger (this) and an action (that). Quick annalogies for this type of recipe can be something along the lines of "if I'm hungry then eat sandwhich" or "if wallet is empty then go to the ATM and widthdraw some money."
Our quick and dirty solution will rely on a community recipe that uses a RSS feed as the trigger and an email as the action. So, in layman terms, if there's a new article published on Appbite, then send me an email. Easy right?
Let's see how we can go about to get that recipe up and running.
Get started with your free IFTTT account
First thing you need is to set up your free IFTTT account. Head over to http://ifttt.com and click the big blue "Join IFTTT" button on the page. You'll need to pick a username, enter your email address and choose your password. It's one of the simplest web forms you'll ever fill in.
Once you have that set up, head on over to the Browse section and search for "rss to email" in the search field. That will bring up every community recipe that matches the two channels. I personally use safenn's recipe (https://ifttt.com/people/sahfenn) for RSS to Email.
Hot tip: Did you know that IFTTT members have created and shared close to 50,000 recipes that you can use for free? That's amazing!
Set up your two channels
Once you click on Use this recipe, you'll have to activate the two channels (RSS and email), if they're not active already. It's pretty easy to do just by following the on-screen instructions. Next up, you need to set up the trigger. For easy reference, just copy paste this link into the Feed URL field on IFTTT: http://feeds.feedburner.com/appbite
Click done, and guess what. You're done! The next time we write a new article on Appbite.com, you'll be the first to receive an email notifying you of the article. That's a dead easy way to stay up to date with our reviews!
What's next?
Go ahead and set up this recipe in your IFTTT account and stay tuned for our next article when we discuss another great way to stay up to date with your favorite blogs. Till next time!