I discovered If This Then That a few days ago and I’m really impressed by the concept. The basic idea is that the ifttt service has channels that it can monitor and broadcast on. You select a trigger (the this) and an action (the that) and the system monitors every fifteen minutes to see if it should take action. A good example of how this works is “If (temperature drops under 55 degrees) then (send me an e-mail)” or “If (I upload a photo to Flickr) then (send a tweet linking to the picture)”.
Unfortunately they don’t have an LJ channel yet (I asked, and they said they’re looking into it), so I’ve been trying to hack something together using RSS feeds and e-mail posting. The way the e-mail channel works on ifttt is that you register, they send a PIN to that e-mail and then you type in the PIN to verify that you control that address. So you’d expect that all I would have to do is try to verify the post by e-mail address and I’d be golden. But no.
I can get it to post to my journal, and I can get it to post to my test journal (
On another note, I’ve been thinking about what ifttt would need to do in order to create an LJ channel. To use LJ as an action channel (the that) all they would need is a username and PIN. Since post by e-mail is governed by authorized sender addresses, no password will be required.
To active the LJ channel, a user of ifttt would give them his LJ username and PIN. Ifttt would then post an activation code to the user’s journal, and he would input it on the ifttt website to prove that he does control the journal. That’s it, the channel is activated and he’s done.
When creating an action the user could then specify community to post to, tags, userpic, mood, music, and even disable comments if they wished.