Using IFTTT Webhooks to post RSS feed data to Mastodon (requires pro account)

Update 2/19/2024: I did this using my free IFTT account but per IFTT "Starting February 15th, 2024, webhooks Applets will be disconnected for free users". Currently a subscription is $35 a year but of course that may go up.

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Eleven years ago I wrote about using the IFTTT service to create tweets from the RSS feed of my Pinboard shares (which are written for myself and for Emily; there are now over 49,000 entries).  

Back then I was continuing a kind of sharing I started with Google Reader Social (details) and continued with App.net after Social died.

Now Twitter is dying, but, incredibly, Maciej Ceglowski's Pinboard endures. I've migrated to Mastodon (on an instance for veterans of App.net!) so now I use IFTTT (still free for my use) to create mastodon posts tagged #jgshare from that old Pinboard RSS.

I'm writing now to share a bit of how that works. I started with a recipe first published in 2017 and updated in 2022 by KelsonV. That recipe uses IFTTT web hooks: I tweaked it a bit to get the output I wanted:

    Descriptive Title

    URL

    Commentary

The recipe is a bit hard to follow but the key steps are:

1. In Mastodon Profile Preferences Development create an "application" with website "https://ifttt.com/" and Scope of write:statuses. After it's created copy the access token.
2. In IFTTT create a rule based on the RSS feed of your source (in my case Pinboard shares with a particular tag). My rule starts with IF "New Feed Item"
3. The action part of the rule is a web request"
1. URL: https://appdot.net/api/v1/statuses
2. Method: POST
3. Content type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
4. Authorization: Bearer 1234567890 (replace 1234... with your Mastodon access token)
5. Body as below.

KelsonV's post has additional details and screenshots.

The trick in the body was to get line spaces between Title, URL and Commentary. This worked:

status = 

<<<{{EntryTitle}}

>>>

<<<{{EntryUrl}}

>>>

<<<{{EntryContent}}

>>>

#jgshare

When I first ran this I'd get errors in my IFTTT log but the rule worked successfully. The errors went away.

Cleaning up a Twitter account may no longer be possible

Eons ago I wrote using my TrueName. In those days the sun was brighter, the snow softer, Google was good, and unicorns danced on rainbows.

That was a long time ago, in the Second Age. (In the First Age, there was no spam.)

Now I write as John Gordon [2], and my TrueName net content is the essence of bland. Except for a forgotten TrueName Twitter account I'd used for a few months after the fall of Google Reader Social [1]. That one is a bit spicy, and fully available to curious customers and employers.

Be nice to be able to clean that up and make it a part of my corporate persona. Once upon a time I think it was possible to do that, using things like Twitwipe, delteallmytweets, tweetdelete and so on. These days, however, those Twitter App sites are infested with spam and adware. Delete All MY Tweets seemed the least bad so I tried it.

It didn't work. I don't pay much attention to Twitter, but I do know as they turned to the Dark Side they did limit use of their API. I suspect none of these services work any more - I suspect they were sold and turned to the not-good-side. It may be possible to write an AppleScript or Python script to sequentially delete tweets using the twitter web app, but even there I suspect there are limits.

The best I could do was to Protect all of the Tweets on that account. That means anyone who wants to follow it has to be granted permission. Alas, because this is Twitter, current Followers are a problem. You can't simply return them to a non-follower state, you have to Block them. I didn't mind blocking the half that were spambots, but there were a few there who followed me from our Google Social days. Most don't seem to be active on Twitter any more, so I hope they aren't offended. 

One last bit of the old net facade fades away...

[1] My John Gordon Twitter account is active, though it's largely an echo of my much appreciated app.net account.

[2] Yep, G+. I have a few G+ accounts, but my primary TrueName gmail account is G-.

Replacing Google Reader Share: Options emerge with Buffer, App.net, IFTTT and others

On the Day of the Dapocalypse Google ended Google Reader Share, though my old shares are still accessible almost a year later.

Google left a hole in the net that hasn't been filled yet (alas, hivemined).

Something's emerging to fill that space. It's not Google Reader Share; but you can still see the shape emerging.

Today I'm using Pinboard, alpha.app.net, IFTTT and buffer.

IFTTT is the glue that ties things together. Buffer and Pinboard are the note capture mechanisms. Buffer has more style, but Pinboard has the essential structure (title, link, comment) and it's willing to accept cash. App.net is the wild card; a rapidly evolving set of services that may be the foundation for future solutions (see app.net #googlereadershare)

I still miss GoogleReaderShare, but I'm curious to see what will come next.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: How to replace Google Reader: 11/2011 - the 7 core components
• A Parallel Universe In Which Google+ Enhances Google Reader 10/2011 - what could have been. Nice guide for a future replacement.
• Gordon's Tech: Twitter to WordPress via ifttt - limitations: 12/11 - tweets don't have enough structure
• Gordon's Tech: Posterous - a Google Reader social replacement? (nope. Later they were acquired by Twitter)
• Gordon's Tech: After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 11/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails 11/2011

johngordon on App.net - now as a feed

alpha.app.net, the test bed for app.net development, is improving quickly.

it's a bit hard to find, but there are now feeds for user posts and for tags. For example, here's the feed for my app.net posts: https://alpha.app.net/johngordon.

There's no feed yet for mentions, I'm looking forward to that. It will be helpful to add some of these to Google Reader for consumption in Reeder.app.

My posts to App.net are my pinboard postsprocessed by IFTT and Buffer (yeah, a real hack) then posted to alpha.app.net. So they are equivalent to my Twitter posts (except not truncated!) and my google indexed wordpress archives of my pinboard posts.

I'm hopeful that app.net will eventually what Google Reader Share might have been. In time it may become my primary microblogging platform (displacing pinboard, though pinboard has been pretty good to me).

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Pinboard and IFTTT - blog, task, share 7/2012

http://tech.kateva.org/2012/07/pinboard-and-ifttt-blog-task-share.html

Pinboard and IFTTT - blog, task, share

Despite concerns about too many moving parts, I'm still using Reeder, Pinboard and IFTTT as my core information process workflow. I just added two more IFTT actions based on single character Pinboard tags. The current set is:

• s: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag s are "shared" via IFTTT to Twitter and WordPress (it's a public tag, so there's a Pinboard feed too).
• t: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag t generate a Gmail email to a 'secret' toodledo address that creates a task. This is most often a f/u task on a product I'm interested in.
• b: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag b generate a Gmail email to a 'secret' toodledo address that creates a draft Blogger post. (I prefer this to IFTT's limited Blogger channel). These are subjects I would like to write about.

I enter the one letter space separated tags when I share to Pinboard from Reeder.app for iOS and OS X, or from Google Reader. Many posts have two or three tags.

Pinboard and IFTTT - credential outage

I was quite pleased with my jury rigged replacement for my long lost Google Reader Shares. (Few remember them now, the net years have passed like leaves in the wind ...)

I had IFTTT tracking Pinboard posts and creating Tweets and posts to an archival WordPress blog. The Pinboard posts were largely created from the essential iOS Reeder.app and, less often, from Google Reader and Reeder.app for OS X.

It worked. I was happy. I started composing the celebratory blog post and explanation when...

Yes, you can guess. It fell apart.

I don't know why. Pinboard had blocked Superfeedr around that timefor aggressive crawling, but this turned out to be a red herring. IFTTT doesn't use Superfeedr.

IFTTT hasn't gotten back to me, but they're a free service so support is not predictable.

Well, I did know this was going to be a fragile and shortlived solution! I particularly didn't like that IFTTT is "free". I'm now looking for an alternate solution I can build around Reeder.app and Google Reader with Twitter and WordPress as outputs.


Update 6/19/2012: I didn't hear back from IFTTT support, but Pinboard convinced me to dig deeper there. I tried creating a new task but that also failed. The clue was in a screen I'd not visited, the Channels screen.

There I found this icon:

I edited it, reentered my credentials, and it's no longer offline. Now I'll see if it starts working again.

What happened? Well, there are two possibilities, and without help from IFTTT I don't know which is true. One is that Pinboard was unresponsive and IFTTT took the channel offline, but then never restarted it.

The other, which is at least as likely, is that I changed my password to Pinboard (I do that sort of thing) and that any email notification of subsequent credential failure was either misread, mislabeled, or filtered out. IFTTT doesn't use OAuth or similar service with Pinboard, so it needs my credentials to work. If that was the problem then IFTTT might be able to come up with a better way to notify users. For example; there was nothing on the IFTTT task screen to tell me a channel was offline, and when I manually triggered my tasks there was no error message.

Update 6/19/2012b: Fixing the Channels problem did the trick.

Thinking this over, why does IFTTT need my Pinboard credentials anyway? They are reading from a public feed, not writing to my account.

Update 6/22/2012: The latest IFTTT rev has much improved diagnostics. 

Pinboard and IFTTT to Twitter

A few weeks after Google 2.0 killed Google Reader Social, I decided I'd take the Twitter route.

My Twitter feed was active for about two months, but in time I gave up on Twitter (again). It didn't work as a memory management solution, I don't like the length limit and the lack of structure, and I don't expect Twitter to take better care of my data than Google. Worst of all, like Google, Twitter is free. I can't afford free.

Next I ran through PosterousandTumblr. They both failed, for different reasons. Worst of all, both are too expensive.

Lastly, I turned to Pinboard. I thought I'd use it restore access to my Google Reader JSON exports -- but that didn't work. I could have gotten my $10 back, but I like Pinboard's style, microblog post formats, export formats, import options, ownership, feed-focus, and bookmarklet -- and I really like the Reeder (and, via SendTo, Reader) integration. Most of all, I like paying for it. Oh, and it's Google-Free too [2].

So I've stayed with Pinboard. I tag my (all public) posts with 1 tap codes that are meaningful only to me - s for share, b for blogworthy, y for yammworthy. Each tag has its own stream. The 's' stream is really aimed at Emily, but anyone can consume it. It shows up in her copy of Reeder.app and on her iGoogle page.

No, it's not Google Reader Social. Then again, nothing is. I've come to think of GR Social as a future-fluke, a transient window into a future that might never be. Pinboard isn't GRS, but it's the best microblog/share platform in the mundane world. It beats the heck out of Twitter and (shudder) G+.

Except Twitter, despite my neglect, refuses to die. So I decided to try injecting my Pinboard shares into the Twitter stream. Pinboard doesn't support this, and they don't intend to. However IFTT supports both Pinboard and Twitter, so I now tweet from Pinboard via IFTTT (recipe) [1]

For example:

• Original in Pinboard: Pinboard: Bookmark Detail
• Format in Twitter: Twitter / @jgordonshare: Information Technology Cog ...: ""

It mostly seems to work, though I don't know what happens if my Descriptions are too long.

For the moment then, I share the same items in two places:

• Pinboard 's' with feed.
• Twitter - jgordonshare

[1] In my own task I have a colon between Title and Description, otherwise they run together in Twitter.
[2] Is it Google's ambition to be more disliked than AT&T?

Sharing and annotation: Instapaper's supporting apps

I haven't found a replacement for the rough annotation-share-feed ecosystem that had grown up around Google Reader Social (RIP). I've given up, for example, on using Twitter as a Reader Social replacement.

Yes, I miss Google 1.0. I even miss Microsoft these days.

So I'm continuing to explore the pieces of the post-Google world; trying to see where this micro-market may go. This is poorly tracked territory, but today I came across an unexpected guide in the Instapaper: Supporting iPhone and iPad Apps page.

Instapaper has an ecosystem, and although it doesn't have a feed, it will post to Tumblr, Twitter and Pinboard. Tumblr has a feed (barely), Twitter can be turned into a feed (awkwardly) and Pinboard has a feed (and, mercifully, it's not free).

So what can I do with these pieces? Can I archive the output of Pinboard as WordPress posts?

I'll find out.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Pinboard imports Google Reader JSON exports

Update

• I tried Instapaper's bookmarklet, but it hangs in Chrome with a "saving" status in the tab.

Twitter to WordPress via ifttt - limitations

Weeks after Google's Day of Infamy i'm still failing to fully replace Google Reader Shares. Recently I gave up on Tumblr, Posterous, the zombie version of Google Reader, and some screen-scraping attempts to turn G+ streams into feeds.

Lately I've been focusing on my @jgordonshare tweets and tonight I tried using ifttt to create a WordPress feed-equipped archive of tweets.

It was easy to setup the ifttt task to turn the tweets into WP posts. I used a "1 button install" Dreamhost [1] WordPress instance I've been testing. I had to turn on XML-RPC publishing (used by Windows Live Writer, MarsEdit, etc) and provide a WordPress username and password [2].

The ifttt doesn't trigger immediately after tweet creation. I assume it checks the Twitter stream every 15-30 minutes. I manually triggered a check from the ifttt dashboard.

Here's an example of what I got

Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud

... Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud...

Yeah,  not to impressive. The problem is a tweet is simply a string, it has no special structure, no way to distinguish URL from my commentary from page title from annotation (not that there's room for all that). Tweets are much simpler entities than old-style Google Reader shares.

The experiment did work, but the result isn't terribly interesting.

So the quest goes on ...

[1] Use the code "KATEVA" or this link and you are supposed to get 50% off your 1st year costs and I get an equal saving as credit.
[2] Obviously you should create a user for this purpose and create a unique password. IFTTT has to know your credentials.

See also:

• Dreamhost - apparently the kickbacks work 6/2010
• Google reader shared items to Facebook 3/2009 - Google's glory days - before the Fall
• Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed 9/2008 - Google's apex
• My reader shares are back for now - thanks to Keakon 11/2011 - sweet hack, but a bit of a security risk
• Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook 4/2010 - twitterfeed is still around
• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes 9/2008 - never quite worked, but an interesting example
• Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes - 2/09 - fiddling
• Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner 10/2010 - we assume Google will axe feedburner in 2012
• FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader - turning twitter into rss 4/2009
• Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails 11/2011
• After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 11/2011. I haven't tried Zootool yet.

Standard feeds for G+ Profile streams

When G+ Profiles first appeared, I recall that public posts had feeds.

Those feeds disappeared. Now G+ is more of a walled garden than Facebook.

Russell Beattle created an RSS feed app for G+, but then Google's AppEngine price increases put him out of business.

Now Jeff Turner has one ...

Google+ to RSS Feed

This site is still in beta so it might go down from time to time. If you have any issues please submit a issue to Github Issues. I had to up the cache to 60 minutes so we don't run out of API calls in a single day.

Here's my (100% public) John Gordon feed via nodester: http://googleplusrss.nodester.com/107785880910936077757.

It renders in GR. Next I'll try using http://ifttt.com/  and Feedburner to turn my G+ posts into something I can own and others can consume. I hope Jeff can make a business of this somehow.

Markets route around aberrations, and the Net is routing around Evil+.

Update: I tried a feedburner version of Jeff's converter but IFTTT didn't like it. It complained "Feed has items without valid urls".

On the other hand, ifttt will share G+ Posts to Tweets using yet another G+ to feed service - Plu.Sr. Looks like there are more than a few of these! Talk about routing around evil.

So here I am on Plu.Sr, where first sentence becomes feed title: http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=107785880910936077757&short=true.

From this ifttt creates posts on my unused Posterous blog: http://jgordonshare.posterous.com/ -- but only if autopost is turned off.

I tried this one with Feedburner, but it complained: "The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 77: The reference to entity "T" must end with the ';' delimiter."

It's just for play at the moment, but it looks like we'll have some options. At least until Google terminates my John Gordon Profile.

I've also set up a ifttt action to http://twitter.com/#!/jgordonshare from my G+ shares.

Next step will be to get my wordpress microblog working. Then IFTTT will create wordpress posts, and that will in turn have a feed and a twitter stream.

Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails

I got pretty far along on the Tumblralternative to Reader Shares. I even created a kateva.org subdomain with a Tumblr IP A Record to give my Tumblr blog a kateva.org URL.

I tested with Google Reader Mobile and desktop, but the workflow for micro-sharing was too awkward. That looked promising, but all the posts were going to my original Tumblr blog, not the full powered one I'd setup for sharing.

What was up with that?

That's when I discovered the weird world of Tumblr primary blogs ...

Help Center | Tumblr

... What is my “primary” blog? Your primary blog is the one created when you sign up for Tumblr. It represents you (with its name, link, and avatar) when you follow or like other Tumblr blogs. You can read about blog management to understand the differences between your primary blog and additional blogs. Can I switch my primary blog? It’s not currently possible to switch or move your primary blog to another account. You can read about blog management to understand the differences between your primary blog and additional blogs....

Cue the ominous music. I could see where this was going ...

Blog Management | Tumblr

Each Tumblr account comes with a primary blog. A primary blog can fully use all of Tumblr’s social features including Follow, Like, Reply, Ask, and Submit. But, a primary blog cannot be password-protected and cannot be multi-user.You can also create additional blogs on your Tumblr account. An additional blog can be password protected for privacy and security and can be multi-user. But, an additional blog cannot fully use all of the Tumblr’s social features...

The primary blog that is made when you create your Tumblr account will always be the primary blog for the account. It is not possible to reassign which blog on your account is the primary blog. And, due the way in which Tumblr is architected, it is unlikely that we will be able to support reassignment of the primary blog in the foreseeable future. It is also unlikely that we will be able to support password protection on primary blogs....

Yes, it's all about that d*mn closed-world money-making social stuff.

The primary blog is the one that receives my shared items from Feedly. It won't do for what I want.

So now, like Posterous, Tumblr has failed.

Only Twitter and, perhaps, WordPress microblogging, remain.

Oh, and, of course, HiveMined.

No. Please. Not ... not ... Blogger!

See also:

• Tumblr - a Google Reader social replacement?
• Gordon's Tech: Posterous - a Google Reader social replacement?
• Gordon's Notes: Dapocalypse now: Google's day of infamy
• Gordon's Notes: How to replace Google Reader
• Gordon's Notes: The end of Google Reader shares and the rebirth Gordon's twitter feed

After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side

When a character in Charles Stross' Accelerando loses his prosthetic brain he's almost helpless; effectively amnestic. It's the future equivalent of not knowing anyone's number because it's all in your iPhone.

That's how I feel after Google amputated my Google Reader shares. I've got phantom prosthetic memory syndrome -- I keep trying to access a store that no longer exists.

On the bright side, it turns out I have 3 children, 1 wife and 1 dog. Who knew?

On the dark side, for a tech company being stupid is worse than being evil, but being evil AND stupid is even worser. (See, Google really has lobotomized me.)

Bad stuff, but it is time to move on. I've written my Dear Google letter, deleted the G+.app from my iPhone, switched my default search engine to Bing, and installed Firefox on my work machine. I'll work on remembering what was good about Google; we had some good times in Google's glory days.

So what replaces Google Reader social? [1]

At first, I thought it would be Twitter. So I stared using Twitter.

Wow. Martin is right - Twitter is a big step down from GR Shares. I'm sure I'll figure ways to use Twitter, especially after I go to iOS 5.0+, but it's no GR Share.

So what is out there to replace GR? Candidates include Posterous, Tumblr, and Zootool - though none of those seem to be true Reader Share contenders. The original GR team was wonderful.

I'll be looking around in future posts. I'll end this post with a list of what I'm looking for ...

1. Bookmarklet that generates posts with title, url, excerpt and annotation.
2. Must have an RSS feed.
3. Must have a business model that involves me paying for services received.
4. Either I have control over the data store or there's a way to create a read-only repository I can keep.
5. Reeder.app support, so I can use Reeder.app for IOS and Reeder.app for Mac, avoid Google's miserable UI, and prepare for migration to another OPML store.
6. Twitter integration so it tweets shares for those who are good with Twitter's limitations.

See also:

• Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head

[1] I just bought Reeder.app for Mac to reduce the pain of Google's mangling of the GR's most basic feed reader functions.

Update: Curiously, the GR shares still exist. My old share page is up: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jfaughnan, it still has a feed, and items shared in 3rd party apps (Reeder.app, etc) are added there. The share links is simply missing in the redesigned GR UI. I can't consume this feed in GR because it hides it from me, but other people can subscribe to it.

Update 11/3/11: This is a hot topic on, ironically, G+. That's the best source for non-google ideas. Tumblr w/ secondary Twitter reposts seems to be the default choice (more on that to come), but other that are showing up ...

• Netvibes - Dashboard Everything: aimed at megacorp, but has a free option (freemium)
• Ditching Google Reader after the changes? This site makes it easy to use Twitter instead - The Next Web: Go hard to Twitter
• A Parallel Universe In Which Google+ Enhances Google Reader: Ok, so this isn't a fix. Barring brane traversal.

The end of Google Reader shares and the rebirth Gordon's twitter feed

(cross posted to Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech)

Google Reader shares are gone.

I'm not going to switch to sharing via G+.

I will, however, be sharing via Twitter: John Gordon (jgordonshare) on Twitter.

That Twitter stream used to consist of feed-generated tweets from GR shares. Now it's the closest thing I have to an archive of those shares.

Now it will be the primary place I share -- with the help of the Twitter share bookmarklet.