Last week I told you how I made a random post of a day. Well, now I want to Tweet that post once a day.
Now there are a lot (a lot) of possibilities to handle something like that in WordPress, and a lot of plugins that purport to Tweet old posts. The problem with all of them was that they used WordPress.
There's nothing wrong with WordPress
Obviously. But at the same time, asking WP to do 'things' that aren't it's business, like Tweeting random posts, is not a great idea. WordPress is the right tool for some jobs, but not all jobs, after all.
What is WordPress' job is generating a random post and setting a tracker (transient) to store for a day. And it's also WordPress' job to output that data how I want in a JSON format.
The rest, we turn to a service. Zapier.
A Service?
Like many WordPressers, I like to roll my own whenever humanly possible. In this case, I could have added an OAuth library and scripted a cron job, but that puts a maintenance burden on me and could slow my site down. Since I have the JSON call, all I need is 'something' to do the following:
- Every day, at a specific time, do things
- Visit a specific URL and parse the JSON data
- Craft a Tweet based on the data in 2
I dithered and kvetched for days (Monday and Tuesday) before complaining to Otto on Tuesday night. He pointed out he'd written those scripts. On Wednesday, he and I bandied about ideas, and he said I should use IFTTT. Even using IFTTT's Maker code, though, the real tool needed is one that lets me code logically.
Zapier
The concept of IFTTT is just "If This, Then That." If one thing is true, then do another. It's very simple logic. Too simple. Because what I needed was "If this, then do that, and tell another that." There wasn't an easy way I could find to do it with IFTTT so I went to the more complicated.
Three steps. Looks like my little three item'd list, doesn't it?
The first step is obvious. Set a specific time to run the zap. It's a schedule. The second step is just a web hook saying 'Get the data from URL.' And the third step is aware!
Pretty nice. If you click on the 'add field' box in the message content (upper right), it knows how to grab the variables from the previous steps and insert them. Which is damn cool.
