Automating the If Then with IFTTT

IFTTT stands for If This Then That. It is a way to automate a basic If statement to connect blogs, rss feeds, and social media. Above is an image of an active IFTTT recipe. In it If a new post comes out on the Complete Developer Podcast (a new episode) it will automatically post to my blog so those of you following me but not the podcast will have a chance to see when new episodes are posted.

It uses API (Application Program Interface) to check and see IF there is a new post THEN it uses the social media API like Twitter's REST to post. There are a total of 220 channels to pull from in the IF section and push to in the THEN section. Each of the channels has options specific to it's media form like posting a link or an excerpt from a blog, adding a picture, or specifications for when and what to post.

For example, I have IFTTT setup to post my blog posts to the Complete Developer Podcast site and set up to post of my blog from there when new episodes come out. IFTTT has an option to only post from my blog when it contains certain labels. This way I am able to avoid creating a posting loop when new episodes come out.

Also, I can disable a recipe (If/Then statement) without having to delete it. This way if I'm going to be on vacation and don't want the photos I post on Facebook to flood my other media I can turn that off so that when I return I don't have to go through the process of setting it up again. Below is an image of a recipe that has been turned off.

With IFTTT you can set up some interesting automations. Here are a few tricks I've picked up in the past couple of days working on the Complete Developer Podcast website as well as my own blog.

Currently I have a setup so that post from here will show up only on the Blogs page of the Complete Developer Podcast. I did this by setting IFTTT to only pull posts with the label WordPress from my blog here on Blogger. This allows me to have IFTTT post to my blog from our WordPress site without worry about redundant posts. I then set the IFTTT THEN section to post to WordPress in the category Blog. Using the List Category Posts plugin I created a blank page with the title Blogs then placed the short code for the Blog category so that only the posts in that category will show up in the feed. 

I used a few more of the short codes to allow for use of custom CSS and set the parameters that I wanted for the page. I was even able to match the title covers to the hex code of the color on our logo. 

With this I added the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin to remove the posts in category Blog from search results and SEO (search engine optimization) as well as the Recent Posts feed. This way our blogs only show up in the Blog section in addition to our own personal sites.

This was great, except the first time I used it I typed "Wordpress" in the Labels field on Blogger instead of "WordPress". Because of this error IFTTT did not pull the post from Blogger. Also, if listing multiple Labels put WordPress at the end as comma may interfere with IFTTT. To promote my own laziness and forgetfulness I went ahead and created separate recipes for each of the ways I could type out "wordpress". I then did this for my social media recipes. 

Pod to the Cast

We are ready to publish our first episode. It will be published tomorrow, September 10, 2015. Go check out our website and sign up for the mailing list and listen to the first episode of The Complete Developer Podcast.

This has been an interesting and educational experience. We started working on the idea back in June. I didn't know how much was involved in creating a podcast beyond the recording. Some of the things we have worked on since June include: setting up the website, creating social media campaigns, finding a hosting site, get photos and a logo designed.

This blog post will be about the actual recording and creation of our first episode. I'll post in the future about some of the other issues. I have a post about WordPress that I'm working on already.

The first thing we had to do was to find the right place and right equipment. Our plan was to record at Will's house in his home office. The benefits of this were that we already had the space and didn't have to rent it and for Will he was already there working. However, some things we had to contend with were interruptions from his dogs or his daughter running overhead. Most of these we overcame by recording later in the evening.

My setup for recording

As for equipment we needed good quality microphones and editing software. We wanted to get microphones that didn't use the sound cards in our computers and ones that could last. After doing some research into professional microphones and gaming headsets we decided to go with a high end amateur microphone due to the sound quality and price. At Best Buy we found what we were looking for in the Yeti.

Next we needed editing and recording software. We found an open source editor that had all the functions we wanted with Audacity. This took care of everything except our recording as we planned on being in separate rooms and using Skype Callburner to record our calls then add the two tracks together in editing. Well, that didn't turn out so well either because we didn't have the settings correct or Callburner just isn't meant for recording podcasts. We settled on being in the same room and using both microphones, again combining in editing. This has worked out as Audacity records well and has a function to line up the tracks.

Now comes the fun technical part of the post. I did most of the editing simply because I had more time. It took about 15 hours on our first episode. That time has greatly reduced with subsequent episodes as I was learning how to use Audacity as I was editing. As the show continues you'll be able to hear my progress in the quality of the episodes.

The first thing we did was to have a few seconds of silence to assess the background noise. In editing I used the noise reduction function to first sample the background noise then remove it from each track. The only material I found on how to do this was in video tutorials so in a later post I'll explain how to use several of the functions in Audacity. The next thing we did was to isolate the vocals so that our voices would overpower any residual background noise. We have found that the amount of gain on the microphone has a significant effect on the background noise and setting the gain is a balancing act as my voice is more boisterous than Will's.

What "umm" looks like.

Next came actual content editing. I can safely say that I can look at an audio feed and tell you who is talking at that moment. Most of what I did here was to remove pauses and filler noises like umm and err. We both use umm a lot and I can identify that word in the waveform of an audio file now. This took the majority of the time as I had to listen to various segments multiple times to make sure that the edit sounded natural.

After this we added the intro, special segment, and closing music. Finally we were ready to master and render the audio into an mp3 file. I was so proud I put it on my phone and made my father listen to the entire episode.