Up front disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation with these people except as a user. I just like their service.

So I used to have this project called Gourmand. It scraped my interests from various places across the internet and shoved them into delicious. Favourited tweets, google reader shared items, stumbleupon thumbs ups and reddit votes. I’d vaguely intended to get hacker news in there but never got around to doing it.

It bit rotted – various features stopped working as services moved on, and I decided that I didn’t really have much interest in maintaining it. So I just turned it off.

I’ve since moved from delicious to pinboard, which is a rather nice (paid) replacement for it. It’s not as good for discovery, but it’s much better as a bookmarking service. It has a bunch of nice search and integration features, and in particular my tweets and google reader items are now going into my bookmarks again.

This of course caused me to want more, and in particular want my reddit upvotes to go into it. I briefly talked to the author of pinboard on twitter about importing arbitrary feeds. He didn’t want to implement the feature for various reasons but suggested using yahoo pipes to turn the reddit upvote feed into a google reader shared like feed and use that.

I really hate yahoo pipes, so decided to use the API to do it instead. I then promptly proceeded to do bugger all with this intention and there it ended for the time being.

The other day my friend Joanna Geary had some invites going to ifttt (If This Then That), a web automation service. I thought “Hey, that looks neat” so happily took one off her.

I signed in, looked bewildered for a few seconds, clicked some buttons, and about a minute later had my reddit upvotes going into pinboard using the RSS feed channel. Shortly after that I had my metafilter favourites coming in too.

It works well. It handles a somewhat limited range of tasks, but it seems to handle those smoothly and with just enough flexibility to let you do what you want. I’m quite impressed, and definitely recommend checking it out.