It's about time I wrote a post about this invaluable resource, since I depend on it so much. I've been using If This Then That (IFTTT) for a year or two (don't remember exactly). I probably first heard about it on Lifehacker, but only see it mentioned occasionally around the interwebs, and only by geeky types. It's dead simple to use, and will change your online life.

What IFTTT does is to create triggers so that when you do one thing online, something else happens. For example, when I post a picture on Instagram, it is automagically shared to my blog in a new blog post. There are many other things you can do, like say you can be notified when a book becomes free on Amazon, or (one of my favorites) get a specific news feed sent to you by email. You don't have to set these things up yourself; it's easiest to use what others have set up (or recipes; see below).

So, first you set up an account on ifttt.com. Then you can either connect all your channels, (which you can think of as apps, or the websites that you want to have work with the service), or you can do what I did and first browse for "recipes". Recipes are formulae that others (or you) have created to trigger specific responses when specific events happen. When you select a recipe, and then click to use it, IFTTT will tell you if the channels you need to make the recipe work need to be activated. By clicking through and following the steps, you can input your passwords and activate the necessary channels (or have Lastpass do it for you automatically if you roll that way- like I do).

After that, everything is pretty straightforward. Recipes can be turned on and off. You can set your own triggers too (although I haven't bothered to do so). You turn recipes on and forget about them. You do sometimes get recipes that stop working (for example, when a a link in the recipe changes), but that's easy enough to check and fix. New channels are added fairly regularly (and there are recipes to tell you what's new on IFTTT).

There are recipes to record your tweets to an Evernote notebook, and to automatically download Gmail attachments to Dropbox (or Drive, or wherever). You can tell IFTTT to post to Twitter when you post to Facebook, or to change your Twitter avatar when you change your Facebook profile picture. You can create a note in Evernote in preparation for a meeting on your Google calendar. Njalo-njalo, as we say here (=etc).

There are many, many more recipes and channels that I haven't mentioned here, some of which don't even work in my part of the world :) Most do, though. Oh, and the website is beautifully designed and super easy to use. And did I mention that all this is free?!

Have fun.

PS. Since I'm posting this from my phone, I won't be able to post screenshots in any way that makes sense, so another time maybe. I hope this makes sense without them :)