While most people are aware of IFTTT applets that allow you to cross-post to social media or create calendar events, the platform’s functionality with many services allows for plenty of other ways to use it. While I tried out personal automation using Zapier, I also wanted to try out a few applets on IFTTT.
I found that IFTTT can be extremely useful when it comes to getting notifications on my smartphone, as well as providing a few other useful integrations. Between custom applets and some lesser-known existing applets, here’s a look at some tasks I automated on IFTTT that you might not have thought of before.
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5
Weather warnings
More than a forecast
Using IFTTT’s integration with Weather Underground, you can get warnings for specific weather events straight to your smartphone. I created an alert for higher temperatures by setting a trigger in Weather Underground for tomorrow’s forecast. I then set a temperature threshold that would trigger the action, which is a notification that says “Warning! Tomorrow’s forecast is going to be…”.
The hot weather warning is useful for me because warm weather or large changes in temperature often trigger migraines. However, you can also set these weather notifications for rain, cold weather, and even the UV index.
IFTTT’s simple interface makes it the best tool for quick and easy automations so you can set up a variety of updates using the existing integrations in different ways.
4
Custom notifications
Turn IFTTT into a reminder app
Besides notifications related to the weather, you can also set custom notifications that trigger at a certain date and time. For example, I set up a custom notification for the 26th of every month, which is when I need to take my migraine preventative medicine. It involves taking the medicine out of the fridge to reach room temperature, so the notification is a reminder on the day to do this.
I set up a custom applet for this, and it’s easy enough to do using IFTTT’s applet ingredients. If you want to create a custom notification, make sure to set your time zone in the app; otherwise, you end up getting the notifications at odd times.
The Date & TIme trigger lets you create custom notifications at different intervals: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.
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3
Getting notifications for certain YouTube videos
Follow only the videos you want to see
I’m sure I’m not the only one who only watches a YouTube content creator’s channel for a specific series of videos. This means that enabling a channel notification on YouTube would mostly cover videos that I don’t plan to watch.
That’s why I used IFTTT’s YouTube trigger to get messages about YouTube videos from a channel that also meets certain search criteria. In my case, it’s Scary Game Squad videos that are uploaded to Jesse Cox’s channel.
This is another custom applet I created, but you can create it for your favorite YouTube series. You can also adjust the action to work with another service, such as your Android notifications or email platform.
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2
Adding liked YouTube videos to a Spotify playlist
Get your streaming services to work together
While most of my IFTTT applets are custom creations, this one is one created by Google. If you use both YouTube and Spotify, you can get IFTTT to create a Spotify playlist based on videos you like on YouTube.
I find this specific automation useful because Spotify and YouTube often recommend different songs to me. YouTube’s recommendations are more based on the rock songs I enjoy, while Spotify suggests a lot more general alternative music. But I only watch music videos on YouTube; I don’t use it for general music streaming.
With the IFTTT applet, I can bring the two services together when I’m browsing music videos. That said, the right songs will only populate on Spotify if the song is available on the service. I found that accuracy definitely varies, with some strange songs popping up on my Spotify playlist.
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1
Sending free game deals to Discord
A Reddit-based automation
There are a variety of ways to get notifications for free games, including following certain subreddits. IFTTT has existing applets for getting free game notifications, but I found that they were either platform-specific (i.e. only Steam games) or included all games that are free-to-play.
As a result, I set up a Reddit trigger on IFTTT that searches a specific subreddit (r/GameDeals) for new posts with the term “free game”. Once IFTTT picks up a new post meeting the search terms, it will send a message to my personal Discord server.
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IFTTT has a variety of niche automations
If you use IFTTT, I recommend trying out custom applets with supported services to see what types of tasks you can automate. The platform is relatively beginner-friendly and you can even take existing applets and edit them according to your needs. The biggest drawback, however, is that IFTTT’s free plan only supports two concurrent applets. If you want something with more free features, Huginn is a free and open-source alternative to IFTTT.
