Yesterday I talked about how I'm using TextExpander to streamline my daily writing. Today, I’d like to share another little bit of automation trickery to streamline things further.
First, a bit of background context…
WordPress gives you the option to automatically share blog posts on Twitter and Facebook when you hit the “Publish” button. I choose not to use this feature, as I prefer to customise my social posts and schedule multiple updates using Buffer.
However, when it comes to these daily posts, I’m not too fussed. If I can quickly share each post on Twitter and the Tweet literally contains the article name and a link, that’s fine by me.
So, the issue is – how do I automatically schedule updates for just these posts (in the “Daily Writing” category of my website) and not “normal” posts?
That’s when I turned to Zapier.
Within a few minutes, I set up a basic Zap that goes something like this:
- Look for new “Published” posts in WordPress.
- Only continue if the post is in the “Daily Writing” category.
- Schedule a Tweet in Buffer. Add the update to the top of the queue (so it goes out next) with the following format: “Daily post: [ARTICLE NAME] [LINK] #200crappywordsperday”
- Done!
I love using Zapier to make life a bit easier. And if it can help me to sustain my daily writing by helping to remove steps in the process – GREAT!