go bold

I’ve been having a ton of fun lately playing with ifttt, a service that lets you easily glue together different web services you use / rely on every day. If you remember Yahoo Pipes (wiki), ifttt is based off the same ideas – but is much easier to approach, think about, and use. There are a couple of other ifttt flow blog posts around, but my favorite blog entries are the ones that show instead of tell – so, here we go:

The favorite use I found for it so far is my Game of Thrones task – I love The Atlantic‘s coverage but really couldn’t care less about their other Entertainment articles, and they don’t have category-specific RSS feeds. This way, I get things delivered straight to my inbox!

And, in the interest of keeping my inbox relevant, I have higher-frequency / immediate-action-required tasks tied to my GTalk, which makes sure that I can react quickly.

(I’ve noticed that more of my tasks are tied around consumption/notification rather than production. The other blog posts I’ve linked to above seem to tend toward duplicating/publishing content elsewhere, which is an interesting difference.)

The site is really nicely designed and is genuinely fun to use. Get on the invite list and start creating – I’m excited to see what other fun uses I find.

Note: Hah, if you look closely, my Rent reminder, the second task from the bottom has never fired. Clearly, the service is still in beta. I still use Resnooze for scheduled email reminders about things, but am looking forward to ifttt stabilizing enough for me to switch!

With Heroku’s basic database plan, it’s easy to run heroku pgbackups:capture every once in awhile and save a pg_dump backup of your database – but it’s not as easy as it should be to set up automatic backups of your application’s shared database. By combining Heroku’s nifty Cron Add-On (runs a Rake task via rake cron daily for free) with its existing PG Backups support, you can pretty easily get the platform to help you back up your application.

This assumes you have some amazon_s3.yml file in your config with your AWS credentials and your Heroku credentials set in your environment variables.

This currently works under Rails 3.06 and Heroku gem version 2.1.3.

While trying to get this all to work, I borrowed generously from http://librarymixer.posterous.com/40960547 (seemed to work under the Heroku gem version 1.19.1) and http://metaskills.net/2011/01/03/automating-heroku-pg-backups/, with lots of tweaking necessary to account for gem updates.