Productivity Tools – Create Yahoo Pipes to Boost Personal Productivity

November 14th, 2011 Posted in How-to, Webapp Reviews, Work
1 Comment »
On every Monday I review web apps and share tips of productivity and work management.  SUBSCRIBE to RSS feed or email updates to know more!

Last week I wrote a post about using ifttt to boost personal productivity.  What ifttt does is automating information gathering and processing to ease your life.  Today I want to introduce another web automation tool, Yahoo Pipes, which is another powerful tool I use daily.

 

Yahoo! Pipes – Automate Your Online Life

Yahoo! Pipes is an online tool that helps users to compose their own recipes of automated process.  You do this by linking different standard modules to create a complete process.  There are many different types of modules available in Yahoo! Pipes.  They are grouped under the following types:

  • Sources
  • User Inputs
  • Operators
  • URL
  • String
  • Date
  • Location
  • Number
  • Deprecated

It is not difficult to understand what these modules do.  Obviously Sources modules help to pull data from web sites.  Location and URL modules collect location and web site address information, Date gets the date and time, etc.  Some modules are interactive that they obtains input from the pipe creator or user.

 

Yahoo! Pipes – Create Your First Pipe

Using Yahoo! Pipes is not as easy as using ifttt, but it is not difficult at all.  I found this video that you may want to watch:

Let me show you the whole process by screenshots.  Let’s say, tech geek Tom subscribed to a number of RSS feeds of different tech blogs (including Cloud High Club of course!).  He wants to combine these RSS feeds into one feed so that he does not need to subscribe to the same list of feeds in all his feed readers on the computer, tablet and smartphone.  So he goes to Yahoo! Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes - Create Pipe

Tom clicked Fetch Site Feed on the left sidebar, copied the RSS feeds and paste into the URL fields.  Then he linked the “Fetch Site Feed” box to the “Pipe Output” box by dragging one node to another.  He then clicked Save and “Run Pipe…” to generate the pipe.

Yahoo Pipes - Pipe Created

Bang!  It’s done.  A new feed containing the contents of all feeds Tom inputted is created.  He can enter this feed URL into any feed reader.

Yahoo! Pipes is certainly more than this.  Instead of demonstrating all its features to you one by one, let’s just show you some pipes created by other users.

…and much more.  There are many pipes that other users created and made public that you can use.  Once you found a great one, you can copy it and make it yours by clicking “Clone”.

Yahoo! Pipes ia a very useful tool to save people’s time spent on finding and processing information.  It just lacks a nice-looking user interface.  Try it for a few times and you would gradually pick up and enjoy using this intelligent system.

 

Yahoo! Pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

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Productivity Tools – ifttt Boosts Your Personal Productivity By Web Automation

November 7th, 2011 Posted in How-to, Webapp Reviews, Work
1 Comment »
Every Monday I review web apps and share tips of productivity and work management.   SUBSCRIBE to RSS feed or email updates to know more!

In this Monday productivity tools series, I have introduced many online productivity tools that boost personal productivity.  These web apps are great but they more or less require some input before the output is generated (input -> process -> output, a typical structure of a “system”).  They help us to manage the process and output stages, but still human input is usually required.  Could we take the automation process to a new level by reducing human input as well?

Today I’m going to introduce a creative web app, ifttt, which takes care of the web automation completely.  It is a “set and forget tool” that receives information on your behalf, digest it and produce the processed results in your prescribed form.  I have been using it for a few months and am very pleased with what it helps me to do.

 

ifttt – A Personal Productivity Tool

ifttt stands for “if this than that”, meaning that if a condition is met, a pre-defined task would be performed.  In ifttt, you can customize the triggering condition and task to perform, as well as how the information is processed before being outputted.

Productivity Tools - ifttt - Create Tasks for Personal Productivity Boost

 

ifttt supports many popular web apps and online services.  Each of them is called a “Channel”.  By specifying the channels for “this” (input) and “that” (output), and customizing how things are being processed within, you create automated “Tasks”.  Currently you can use the following channels in ifttt.  By mixing and matching these channels, you get virtually unlimited possibilities.

Productivity Tools - ifttt - Channels

 

For example, a basic but very useful task I have been using for Cloud High Club is one that takes any new item in the blog’s RSS feed to Twitter and tweet.  Everytime I made a new blog post, a new tweet about it is automatically made.  It looks like this:

Personal Productivity Boost by ifttt - Twitter Task

 

See?  Just enter the feed URL, the tweet format and give this task a name, you have completed a new task.  It takes less than 1 minute.  You have the liberty for deciding what to include in the tweets, such as the content title, url, author or any custom text.  These are called “Addins”.

Personal Productivity Boost by ifttt - Addins

 

ifttt Recipes – Golden Productivity Tools

So how could we use ifttt to increase personal productivity?  Well, there are unlimited ways to use ifttt.  You can create tasks that send reminders to you at specified time by SMS or email, make a phone call and receive MP3 voice message in Gmail, receive SMS notification when a specified sender writes to your Gmail, etc.

What’s more, ifttt has a recipes database, where users can share their tasks with other users.  You can find many many useful recipes there.  Whenever I want to create a new task, I’ll first check if there is any existing ones for use.  Many of them are real golden productivity tools.

Productivity Tools - ifttt - Recipes

Summary

ifttt is an easy to use personal productivity booster.  You can create automated tasks without any coding knowledge or using any web app APIs by yourself.  The recipes on ifttt are ready-to-use productivity tools that help you to kick start web automation without trial and error.  It reminds me of the Automator in Mac which takes care of Mac app automation.  ifttt is not only a web app implementation of Automator, it is easier to use.  Try it!

Official Site: http://ifttt.com

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