HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN AUTOMATED WORKFLOW

As our top picks show, IFTTT comes with a library of useful pre-rolled functions. But you’re not restricted to these applets: if none of them meets your requirements, you can easily create a “recipe” of your own. All you need to do is set up a simple procedure that checks for a particular condition and runs a specified action when it’s met. Here, we’ll build an applet that monitors an RSS feed for particular stories and sends them to us by email, so we don’t need to manually check.

1 Log in to IFTTT, then click your name at the top of the interface and pick New Applet. Click the big blue “+this” link, then pick RSS from the list of available services. Then, choose “New feed item matches”. (The other option, “New feed item”, triggers an action whenever any new item appears on your specified RSS feed, without checking for a particular subject or keyword.)

2 Let’s set up our applet to aggregate stories about Internet of Things (IoT) from The Guardian’s technology channel. A quick web search tells us that this RSS feed is located at “https://www.theguardian.com/uk/technology/ rss”, so we’ll enter this in the Feed URL box, and enter the search term “IoT” to the keyword box. We now click “Create trigger” to store it.

3 Now we’ve set up our test condition, it’s time to add an action by clicking the big blue “that” link. If you simply want to send the results to yourself, click the Email action, which bundles them into a message and dispatches them to the address you used to sign up with IFTTT. If you need something more flexible, such as emailing to a group, pick the Gmail option.

4 From here, pick “Send an email”, and add up to 20 addresses in the To field. You can optionally add up to 20 more in the CC and BCC fields, for a maximum distribution list of 60 addresses. You’ll notice that the Subject and Body fields are already populated, but you can change their contents and append variables from the feed by clicking “Add ingredient”.

5 Click “Create action” to save your applet, then review it and click Finish to make it live. It will be switched on by default: if you ever want to disable it, click the “On” slider to change it to “Off”. To delete it, click My Applets at the top of the IFTTT interface, click the cog at the top of its widget, then click the Delete link at the bottom of the next screen.