If you’re like me, occasionally you end up binge watching TV shows or movies due to not being able to sleep. Since this site is essentially a commonplace book for the things I do online, that ideally includes the movies and TV shows I’m watching. And I wanted a way to pose these without having to load the new post screen on my phone so I could just use my usual TV tracking app.
Enter IFTTT and Trakt
The easiest way to do this, at least as far as I’m concerned, is to use IFTTT. To keep this short, I’ll just go through the steps.
Note: I’m using a screen reader to do this, so these instructions may not make sense for mouse users.
First, ensure that you have an account on Trakt, and that you’re a VIP member so that you can get access to the specific RSS feed you need. Note that these feed addresses contain an account-specific query string which you will need to keep intact to ensure you get the right feed. You can find these on your dashboard once you’re a VIP member.
Second, log into IFTTT, and activate the link that says “Create”.
Once you’re on that page, choose your service. For this case, it will be RSS. When choosing your trigger, you’ll want “New feed item”. For the feed URL, you’ll want the address for your watched feed from Trakt. Paste that into the box.
Next, you’ll want to choose “webhooks” as your service for the “then” part, and “make a web request” for the trigger.
When you choose to make a web request, you’ll need the following:
- Your micropub endpoint, which will take the form of example.com/wp-json/micropub/1.0/endpoint
- Your method will be post
- Your content type will be application/x-www-form-urlencoded. This is the simplest method. If you’re familiar with json, you can choose that method.
- Additional headers field is blank in my usage, but if you want to play around this you can send additional http headers along with the request.
Next is the body of your request. This will take the form:
access_token=[token]&h=entry&watch-of={{EntryUrl}}
Where [token] is an auth token generated by the indieauth plugin. I have one specific to IFTTT that I use for all my recipies.
After you’ve saved your app, you can start using Trakt to log the TV and movies you’re watching.
Note: I have not figured out how to do this with something like Youtube, because Youtube does not give us an RSS feed of our watch history, although it does provide a page for our watch history. So you’ll need to log those kinds of posts manually if you use Youtube a lot. Same goes for likes and such from that service.
Things I’d like to automate logging of but still haven’t figured out yet
The one kind of post I have not figured out how to automate yet is exercise posts. Mostly because Strava doesn’t provide any sort of decent markup to grab, and no RSS feed, and Peloton and Apple Health won’t talk to anybody but themselves, and even if they did I haven’t yet figured out how to format the body of the request to send an exercise post kind to the micropub endpoint. As soon as I figure this out I’ll document that too.
I hope others find this helpful.
Reposts