For immediate (within 15 min) notification of TDP News events

[Sean Setters]

I've been testing something out for a couple of months now, and it's been working brilliantly. Have you ever wanted to be immediately notified of new posts to The-Digital-Picture news section? If so, here's one way to do it:

1) Sign up with IFTTT.com.

The site is called "If-This-Then-That," and it uses user specified actions to trigger various events. You'll need to grant IFTTT access to the different services you may want to use with it--phone, email, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, etc. For example, I set up my IFTTT account to send me a text message everytime the low temperature in my area falls below freezing; the text message reminds me to bring my plants inside the house. After that, I realized I could use IFTTT to send me a text message anytime Bryan added a news item to his RSS feed. Voila--instant notification of news events (or, rather, within 15 minutes of the news posting, the standard cycle check time). Anyway, you may have to play around with the site for a little while to fully understand how it all works--I know I did.

I set up the TDP news notification as a shared recipe in IFTTT. So, once you're set up with IFTTT (and have set up Text Messaging with them)...

2) Use the recipie on this page to start receiving text message notifications of TDP News posts.

If you prefer not to be notified via text messages, you can set up a similar recipe (or modify the one above) to send you emails instead.

What else can you do with IFTTT? I originally set up an automatic posting notification for Facebook. Anytime I would post a new photo (or group of photos) to Flickr, IFTTT would post to Facebook on my behalf saying, "Hey, I just posted ## pictures to Flickr. Check it out!" However, I deceided to turn off that recipie and actually post the photos onto Facebook as well as Flickr.