Using Twitter with IFTTT

​This is going to be the first in a series of automation-based entries, focusing on really helpful tools like IFTTT (If This Then That), Instapaper, Hazel, 1Password, and other apps that help automate repetitive tasks. 

The entire point of computers is to automate repetitive and tedious tasks, so why are we constantly letting it bog us down in mindless work? ​

Recently, Twitter stopped Linkedin from using its API, which means Linkedin people can't see or distribute tweets on the social network. ​But there's a website called IFTTT.com that allows users to send information from one online service to another. It's a very, very robust automation engine, and I'm going to be writing several posts about this site alone. 

IFTTT calls its tasks 'recipes', as you can create them and then share them with other people to do the same. Below is a recipe I created called "Send Tweets to Linkedin." ​

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​I use IFTTT to send my tweets to two more places: Facebook, and Evernote (links go to IFTTT recipes, which you can simply use yourself by activating these channels in your account). The Facebook recipe is simple enough, but the Evernote one is pretty complicated. Essentially, I modified a recipe created by Justin Blanton. His idea was to send all tweets to a single text file in Dropbox (which is pretty genius). But I like to use Evernote as my personal archive for everything, so I had it send all tweets to a single Evernote file. It's the same recipe, which you can see below: 

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​It works beautifully. Now, my tweets are all organized in Evernote's incredibly-searchable database, as well as distributed across various networks. To make it even more complete, I also have recipes taking @ replies and favourites to the same note, so I can see a pretty clear timeline of my activity.