If your not using If This Then That, you should
If your not using If This Then That, you should
If This Then That is a set of webapi's that allows you to interlink accounts with actions. http://ifttt.com
Why I Use IFTTT
I use ifttt in order to broadcast my message from G+ to my other social accounts. Recently I have decided that G+ will be my platform of choice for originating my content but I have felt like I just abandoned my friends and family on facebook, twitter, my blog, and IN. I didn't want to do that so I have been posting things in several areas which ment I didn't get it right all the time and left several big gaping holes in content that I sent out to my friends. This is where ifttt came to the rescue.
How I Use IFTTT
The first step is to get an RSS feed of your Google + account. I use http://gplus-to-rss.appspot.com/ all you have to do is enter your G+ user id into a field and it pulls back an RSS feed of your latest post.
don't know how to get your G+ ID? http://ansonalex.com/google-plus/how-do-i-find-my-google-plus-user-id-google/
Next you can either use predefined recipes or create your own custom task.
I chose to create my own as I wanted full control of the message being delivered.
The four action I have are:
G+ to Twitter: This action takes an abbreviated portion of any post in my feed and shares it plus a link to the full post on twitter.
G+ to FaceBook: This action takes the URL of the latest post and simply adds the message "My Latest G+ Post" on it. This behaves just like sharing a link on FaceBook, it will fill in the short description and url.
G+ to Linked In: this works the same as the FaceBook feed but with Linked In
G+ to my Blog: This is probably the most tricky one. I use wordpress as the backend to http://dlbates.com/blog/ so I wanted any google plus content that I tag with iftttb to post to my blog. For this I told IFTTT to search through my RSS information and if it contains the tag then post the content to my blog with a custom title and tag.
One more thing to mention is that if you do this like I have done you may want to disconnect the interlinking you may have setup through twitter and linked in or you will have duplicate post.
Enjoy
David
ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.
You could have seen it first on Google +
Just Shutup and go to CarMax
Today me and the wife finally put an end to the constant problems we were having with our 08 town and country.
Back in May we bought an 08 Town and Country with very low miles and it was all decked out, power everything, navigation, leather… you get the idea. We lovd it and it was in our price range.
About a week after we brought it home we had non-stop problems with it. Check engine lights, tire pressure monitoring problems, doors jamming, seats jamming, and finally the sunroof started leaking. Since we had bought the car from Carmax I started to communicate to them through the store and twitter. They were so helpfull and after replacing the computer they said if you have any more trouble we’ll buy the car back from you and they did just that.
So last sunday me and the wife set out to find a car that will hold 6 ppl comfortably and within the same price range. I was looking to get all of those features back but since the wife is the one who drives it day in and out I decided it was best to just let her pick the car she liked and felt comfortable with. All in all we looked at about 7-10 cars, she liked some I liked others, and we settled on a 2011 Kia Sedona. It had very low miles, was brand new, but had very few features. So we bought it, added a DVD Player to it and now everybody is happy. Take a look at the pictures below.
Thank you CarMax you are truely a great dealership.
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Adobe Needs to Stop Installing Malware
As an Adobe Flash developer I was appalled and offended when Brandon Potter told me that Adobe was installing software on users machines when they explicitly opted out of the install. Totally ridiculous, why would Adobe be doing that? Well I don’t know the answer to that but I can tell you that it is true. If you download the latest version of flash player Adobe will ask you if you want to install McAffee Antivirus. Even if you check no it will still install it… As a developer I chose Adobe as a platform I could trust as they did not do these kind of things in the past… Now I am having to re-evaluate that trust and with so many other alternatives for cross platform development like Silverlight I don’t know if I will continue to use Flash.
Full Story on Brandon’s Blog-Dear Adobe: This is NOT okay
Thanks
David Bates
Welcome Samuel Lucas Bates
Baby Sam was born on June 7th at 10:58am he weighed 7pounds and was 20″ long. We are still out on the haircolor as my wife refuses to believe she didn’t get the darker hair she requested but he has big blue eyes and looks like his older brother Daniel. Jess was in labor for about 12hours and did remarkably well. Daniel has taken well to his new duties as Big Brother and has helped us sooth baby Sam several times by giving suggie and holding his hand. My Mother-In-Law has a blog as well with more pictures and description… check it out here and enjoy the pictures below:
Heres to a bright future and much daddy play time 
David Bates
Just an update
I have tried to update my blog many times since my trip to Vegas. I have had several topics to discuss but never get the chance to write them down. Over the past couple of weeks I have been working almost non-stop for both work work and my side-work. I have had very little play time and in that time I decided to play with my son as soon there will be two of them to play with and I want to make sure he knows that he is very special to me. I truely believe he will be a great big brother and hope that he will always know I love him. Speaking of that my wife not only had one baby shower but two as my work hosted a sort of suprise shower for her. It was great! My department is a great one as they truely care about their co-workers. I can say that I love my job mainly because of the people I work with.
So I hope to update this site more frequently as I believe I will have a little more time soon.
Thank you for reading
David Bates
