I made one of those non-resolutions (I prefer them as silent promises) to make an effort each month of 2026 to mop up some of my digital messes. No pledges here.
To be honest, some like this one are not really all that much of a technical achievement, no where in the neighbour hood of Doug Belshaw’s major platform moves (alas you jumped the Ghost, no more trackback pings for you). On to the show.
If Raise Prices And Reduce Services Then…
I was a big fan of the idea of IFTTT when it came out, for making the connecting of different web services about as non programmy as could be, and also at an approachable level. Now its but one of a fleet of nameless other intgerator like services, more technically Integration platform as a services (iPaaS). Woah, on checking, I maybe mis calculated its vintage as Wikipedia informs it started in 2010.
With just a guess, I likely first used it to be triggered when this blog made a new post to then male an announcement on some kind of social media site related to birds. I tossed in more with tweets from flickr tagged photos, and from pinboard tagged stuff.
The enpoopification started with Twitter’s API self mutilation, calling for signing up for “pro” service. I then put it to use when I shifted my messaging to post Mastodon, via some gnarly but doable approaches via a web hook. They also reduced (several times) the number of applets you got for free, then the web hook made the step to pro. It was about $4 a month, I was willing to go there for a while.
A good bit of this I covered in my Reclaim Open 2025 spat on Small Pieces [Still] Loosely Joined:
At some time later I came across Make.com which is more like the adults version. You can do so much more, with applying functions to outputs, manipulating more elements of the data, and even creating more complex flows than “if this then that”. The diagram view had a bit of a throwback to Yahoo Pipes. Make call’s ’em “scenarios.”
I also found that my archive had gotten big, and the IFTTT tool was hardwired to create a new sheet after 2000 rows. I don’t want that.
My experimentation there went in a number of directions, and I got to one of those modes where to keep the free account I spread them across ones made with multiple email addresses. So I bit off on a paid account (about $10/month) with plans to do what I have done this month.
Moving IFTTT On Over
This was not too much work. Quite a few of mine are scenarios triggered by tags in my Pinboard feed. I could not get the Pinboard gizmo to work in Make.com, but using the RSS feed for my tags has been a charm. But my mid January I had gotten my IFTTT applets down to:
And boom, my checkbook was now $4/month more in the black.
The Mastodon Toot Archiver Thing
From past experience I knew the value of keeping my own hosted archive of my social activity https://tweets.cogdogblog.com (always thank the great Martin Hawksey for his solution). In January 2024 I started one if IFTTT to archive my Mastodon posts to a Google Sheet. The main reason is that its nearly impossible to reliable search there, and very often I am trying to find when I posted something, or recall a link of something posted.
In a sheet, I can search on the text, and then get the url from an adjacent column.
So I got one going and let it do its thing. It helps so much that Mastodon is very generous in its RSS feeds, you have lots of things to tap into, but I went for the obvious which is the feed for one’s own posts, in my case for my account at https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog my RSS feed is https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog.rss
I thought all was good, but a few weeks ago I went to my archive to search for something I was pretty sure I posted and it was not there. I spent way too much time searching in my feed, and barely, almost absent mindedly stumbled across it.
You see what I was looking for was not a post but a reply to my own post. And that’s the thing, in Mastodon-verse, a post is the first thing saif, replies are something else. And replies are not in that feed URL.
And thus I went digging and searching and digging and I got a glimmer of an answer in a forum post about some platform named Graphene that there was a vairiant of the Mastodon RSS feed for ones posts to get posts with replies- instead of using as a feed https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog.rss I tried https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/with_replies.rss and damned if that did nto work, I got all my activity in one feed, posts and replies, country and western.
I had checked the usually reliable source FediTips for details on the RSS Feed which was worded like you could not get replies.
Note that the RSS feed of a Mastodon account only shows posts with public visibility, you will not see replies or posts with other visibilities.
https://fedi.tips/following-mastodon-and-fediverse-accounts-through-rss/
Regardless, I changed my RSS feed in Make.com and started checking my results.
And here is where I sent myself down a bad trck, and the details are not worth it. I was pretty sure that my hourly calls to get at most 10 new posts from the feed, seemed to be adding them to my sheet in the wrong chronological order. I dove into learning how in Make to do something to move my results into an array, then reverse it, then do the operation. Lts of time spent figuring out this flow. I did all that, and was ready to declare myself done… and it was now backwards again.
My step then was to scrap getting a buncg og new posts every hour and archving, to running it like every 3 minutes to get just 1. That sort of worked, but felt wrong.
One more redo, back to the simple approach to check it every hour for at most 12 new items… and its doing things in the right order. I am pretty sure this is a PEBKAC. Or this was what get for not being a vibe code dude. So here is the working parts, the RSS Feed is the trigger:
And here is the RSS Module that shows the 3 things it pulls to put in my sheets columns for date, URL, and post text.
As you can see I make use of some date formatting functions because the raw data in the feed is in a different format, and that I can rinse the HTML from the description. There’s much more you can do with functions, this is baby level steps. I rather like when you are working with these, you can see the RSS feed data it can get and latest values on the right.
Regardless, after way too much time futzing around, my archiver is now operating smoothly. I think.
My spreadsheet has a raw data tab, I prefer to always do that, then manipulate in separate sheets, a “cleaned” one because with IFTTT I had to strip HTML with a regex, and also a nifty summary, notes sheet:
I may have spent way too much time fiddling with it. I’d be much more productive if I just had Claude-d the whole deal.
Bottom line is I can delete / negate my IFTTT account. That’s the cleanup. I did leave a mess.
These are all the things I have now running in Make.com, quote a few pinboard stuff to posting in Mastodon, other stuff sending photos out to Felix’s Mastodon. You can see two I had posting stuff to Discord, that was for some shorter projects, but that integration is easy to do.
And that’s January cleanup, take that off my list. Hmmm, what needs mopping up for February?
Featured Image: Someone Has to Clean the Ruins flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license modified by me to slap a screen shot of IFTTT onto the walls at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (sorry about making that a mess too).
