Recently while going through my feeds I came across a awesome new tool called ifthisthenthat. It’s basically a templated way of connecting various different web services on the web with a very easy to use interface. It’s one of those awesome ideas with a lot of applications and I decided to put it to use promoting this blog.

Ifthisthenthat is made up of a set of recipes that you can create yourself or you can use recipes that others have created. Its fairly simple to create a recipe of your own, but for this post I didn’t need to create anything new at all. If you want to create your own recipe check out this site and this one as well.

To begin with you’ll need to set up an account with ifthisthenthat and it consists of the standard registration with email confirmation. After that you’ll need to activate each of the channels that you want to connect into. Channels are the services that you wish to work with ifthisthenthat. For my purposes I’ve got channels for my wordpress blog, my Facebook account, my twitter account, and my linkedin account. (There are also a number of others that you can connect into, but that’s all I’ve done at the time of this article.)

At this point all you need to do is find the recipes. Recipes are pre made templates that perform operations between two channels. For my site I’ve added recipes that will check my WordPress site and post to twitter, Facebook, and linkedin that I have a new post on my site with a link to it. After you’ve selected your recipes and added them ifthisthenthat now calls them tasks and puts them into your task list. Here are a list of the tasks that I’m currently using:

Tasks used to promote this blog on social media.

Now a bit of a warning, ifthisthenthat is currently in beta so make sure you check behind it, although everything I’ve tried with it has worked great. The system also polls every 15 minutes to run the tasks so there is usually a slight lag before posting.

There are also thousands of other recipes to try out on the site as well. I’m currently using one to thank everyone for following me on twitter and to send me an email whenever Netflix adds something new to its streaming library. Regardless of whether you use ifthisthenthat for promoting your site or not it’s an awesome tool for integrating your various web services, and worth looking into.