Announcing blog posts on Twitter using IFTTT

When you have a blog you usually want to let your followers know when a new article is posted. This blog has an Atom feed but RSS readers are less common than they used to be and seem a bit old fashioned.

• Announce on Twitter
• Quick solution: IFTTT
• Invalid Atom feed
• Success

Announce on Twitter

Announcing a new blog post on my Twitter account seems like the modern way to go. But how?

A long-term solution will probably be to use a post-commit or post-push hook in GitHub where this blog is hosted.

Quick solution: IFTTT

I remembered that I have an account at If This Then That and decided to try using that. It is already linked to my Twitter account so that part of the process was ready to go. I created a new Applet (IFTTT-speak for a set of rules that link services together; formerly called a Recipe) to check the Atom feed periodically and tweet an announcement.

But IFTTT showed the Applet as never run and did not display any error messages that I could find.

Invalid Atom feed

IFTTT help pages include a link to the W3C Feed Validation Service. Using that showed the feed to be invalid because the email address field was empty. This was solved by adding author.email to _config.yml. (I used a valid email address that I can get my mail provider to filter if it starts attracting spam.)

There were other, minor issues, including the link information showing http://blog.michaelstrasser.com instead of https://blog.michaelstrasser.com. I don’t know why Jekyll does that, but a solution is to add an explicit url value to the configuration file:

url:  https://blog.michaelstrasser.com

(This value is only used in Jekyll production mode. In the default development mode it is overwritten by the actual URL: http://localhost:4000 by default.)

Success

Update: The tweet for this page is:

By default, IFTTT uses its own link shortener, but I turned that off as described here.