The internet has replaced my brain, and I'm okay with that

[yendi]

There's a lot of virtual hand-wringing over "Google Brain," the use of Google as a substitute for knowing things. It's silly on all sorts of levels, of course, from the fact that we live in an age where being a "Renaissance man" would mean having an incredibly limited scope of knowledge, to the fact that for many tasks, just-in-time learning really does make more sense.

So yesterday, sairaali asked about a link I'd posted. I was able to remember the post, but not the link itself, and I also remembered that I'd posted it to Facebook. Unlike LJ (which is reasonably easy to browse back in), or Twitter (which is a pain, but manageable), Facebook makes it nigh-impossible to find old posts, even if you're willing to brute-force browse your entire personal timeline. It's just awful.

But then I remembered -- I'd used If This Then That! IFTTT is basically everything Yahoo Pipes was supposed to be -- a tool that allows people to connect different services together to create "recipes." Some folks use it to do things like get text alerts when rain is forecast, some use it to save all email attachments in Dropbox, some use it to map iOS locations on Google Maps and then export that to a Google Spreadsheet. You can do a lot with it*, and I don't use nearly as many tools in the kit as some folks do (Also, a bonus feature of IFTTT is sometimes discovering new and useful tools early in their cycle).

But one that I do use is a simple recipe that takes any link I post to Facebook, and saves that to my Pinboard account. For those not familiar with it, Pinboard is basically what Delicious should have been, a clutter-free tool with which to save bookmarks. I have all my Twitter and Facebook links automatically sent there (PB does Twitter integration automatically, so no need for IFTTT in that case), and also pin to it directly using a browser plugin (I don't tag all that well, but you're welcome to browse through mine; if I ever have a private link, I can make it private, another nifty feature). About ten seconds of looking through FB links (which get auto-tagged), and boom! I'd found the link I was looking for!

Pinboard charges a one-time fee of a little more than $10 (the price goes up as more users join; it was $9.46 when I signed up about three years ago), but is otherwise free. There's a $25/year option to actually archive every web page you link, which I've been tempted by, but realize I haven't needed very often. But it's an awesome service, and since IFTTT is totally free, between the two of them, they form a really useful ecosystem for managing my links.

*Alas, I haven't found any way to scrape links from LJ posts. There's an RSS tool that will add links to any new post to my Pinboard, but what I'd like is for each discrete link (especially in linkdump posts) to get its own entry. If anyone knows a way I'm missing (maybe with one of the zillion other channels in IFTTT), do let me know.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of virtual hand-wringing over "Google Brain," the use of Google as a substitute for knowing things.

Also, writing. Writing is going to COMPLETELY destroy civilization, since nobody will have to remember anything any more.

[amokk]

Writing totally destroyed the art of storytelling. There's nothing unique now and no way to alter or change a story once it's been written down!

[swashbucklr]

I really want to start using IFTTT, but the setup is daunting for me.

[yendi]

I don't use it for anything hugely complex (and it seems like there are some really complex possibilities), but the basic stuff (links from FB to Pinboard, images from Instagram to Evernote) is pretty accessible.

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

I bought a pinboard account when delicious did a 180 from being a way to share and store links and became a social media thing. I continue to love it - it's easy to use and does just what I want, storing links and not much else.

[yendi]

Yup. Just a simple tool that works beautifully.

[natf.livejournal.com]

Perl?

[yendi]

My coding skills, sadly, are beyond limited.

[natf.livejournal.com]

Ah, and I have not written a line of code since 2000. Do you know anyone else who could write this for you? This was my gut reply because perl is written exactly for these scraping and munging tasks.

[yendi]

Not offhand, but I've tweeted, and will periodically keep searching; it seems like a generally useful thing that I could see many IFTTT users wanting.

[natf.livejournal.com]

Well, I am trying to extract a list of podcasts that I am subscribed to in iTunes as an HTML / LJ post but iTunes only lets me export ALL of the podcast EPISODES as OPML, text, XML or similar. I did look to see if IFTTT could help but it does not seem so and I am not up to writing the perl, python, ruby or similar…

[natf.livejournal.com]

Hubby pointed me at https://scraperwiki.com/ for something I was trying to do. Maybe that will do what you need?

[natf.livejournal.com]

Another possible web scraper site:
https://morph.io/

[yendi]

Thanks! I'll check both of them out!