Keeping up-to-date with community content

[Jad123]

I must first tip my hat to Levo (FMPundit), whose post on the same topic sparked this little adventure and whom has been so gentlemanly in allowing me to offer an extension of his idea.

We're currently in a bit of a golden era for FM blogs and discussions and the commnity has moved away from forums a little. That's made it a bit harder to keep up with it all, unless you're following a lot of accounts on Twitter and you're constantly checking it - unlikely. Levo's genius idea was to make use of a great automation website called If This Then That, www.ifttt.com, which allows you to track feeds and automatically send them to a variety of apps and services. How you use it is up to you but this is how I go about keeping on top of everything. If you want to do the same as me, you will need to set up accounts with IFTTT, Google Reader (you probably won't need to do much if you already have a YouTube/Google account) and Pocket.

I have a Google Reader account set up with all sorts of feeds from my favourite sites, but some of them are so active that it's best to leave them on their own until I choose to send them anywhere. For FM blogs, you can be pretty sure that they won't be bombarding your subscription with stuff, so I like to have a direct IFTTT recipe that sends every post in my FM folder to my reading app of choice, Pocket. Pocket is so good because it converts every post that you save into the same sleek and simple design, and it is far more attractive to read than most websites out there. Personally I struggle to keep my concentration on any sites that stretch across the screen and especially ones that don't adapt well to a mobile screen; Pocket is available as a webapp for computers and as a mobile app for those on iOS and Android devices.

Once its in Pocket, it is saved on the web or on my phone so I can read it whenever and wherever. Within Pocket I can star my favourite articles or ones that I feel are especially interesting and with another IFTTT recipe, I can automatically put these articles onto my Buffer, which is a service that queues articles for you so they are tweeted at specific times, helpful if you don't want to overwhelm your followers. This isn't essential but we always like to tweet articles if we like them, as it helps to give back and share with others.

This is how to set it up:

1. Sign up to IFTTT, Google Reader and Pocket.

2. Add your feeds to Google Reader with the Subscribe button. Most blogs hosted by Wordpress will be the url with "/feed/" at the end but for many sites, you don't need to add anything but the url as Reader will sort the rest out for you.

3. Put all of your feeds into a folder called FM.

4. Go to IFTTT and sign in. Click Create.

5. Click on "This" and then Google Reader.

6. Click "New Item Tagged" and then type the name of your FM folder ("FM" probably). That's the trigger set up.

7. Now find Pocket and click Save for later. Create action.

8. All done! Posts from your FM folder will now automatically send to Pocket, which you can access at getpocket.com or the Pocket mobile app.

If you want to be able to send these quickly to Buffer:

1. Sign up to Buffer and link your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts.

2. Click Create a Recipe on IFTTT.

3. Click "This" and then Pocket.

4. Use "New Favourite Item".

5. Find Buffer and then click Create Action.

6. Any articles that you star or favourite in Pocket will now be automatically tweeted at your scheduled times.

Other options include saving your feeds to Evernote or sending them to alternative reading apps including Readability and Instapaper - all of which use the same process except you use your preferred app as the action rather than Pocket - or automatically converting posts to pdfs and sending them to Dropbox. There is a load of cool things you can do with IFTTT so its worth exploring the popular recipes to see if any are better for you.