YouTube Video GHkQoKn3q08 ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/GHkQoKn3q08/maxresdefault.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: YouTube Video GHkQoKn3q08 - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[automation]] [[social]] [[zapier]] - Summary: YouTube Video GHkQoKn3q08 - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHkQoKn3q08 I am well on the record as saying I hate social media. I have left all social networks except for LinkedIn, which I feel like I need to be on because I create LinkedIn learning content and it is the place where my target audience is, and Blue Sky, which I'm trying really hard to make feel like Twitter circa 2009. I like having a place outside of my blog where I can post things I'm working on and post links to my blog post and other content, but I have decided to make my personal blog my feed of sorts. I moved all of my thought leadership articles to another website, streamlinessreneur.com, the same place as my podcast. And now I am treating casabona.org, or my 20 plus year old website as a repository for my general thoughts and all sorts of other content I'm creating. But I do have a category called briefs which I'm trying to make feel more like those textbased social networks. So you can see if I click to briefs there's no title. There is the posted on time and there is just some text. What I want to do is post these briefs to Blue Sky as native text. And what I was doing was just using Publer to automatically post links from my blog to Blue Sky via an RSS auto poster feature. But with Zapier, I hope I can adjust the way the post looks on blue sky depending on the category of the post. So that's what we are going to do today. Let's first go over to Zapiier's Explore apps and I will type in blue sky. This is the most important bit because I want to make sure that I can actually use blue sky. All right, so blue sky does show up here. And if we scroll to the bottom, we see triggers and actions. I want action create post. Perfect. So text is required. And then the embed type is also there. So now I know that we can pair RSS. So I'm going to type RSS in here. It's going to create our kind of blueprint. So I'll swap these when new item in feed create post. And then I'll click connect these apps. And this will take us right to our builder in Zapier. Okay. So, new item in feed. This is going to be casabona.org. Now, I can make it for multiple feeds. I'm not going to do that. I really want casabona.org to be the canonical place that is sending out links to social networks. The feed URL is going to be casabona.org/feed. If you use a WordPress site, it's it's usually going to be SLfeed. If you're using a different service like Squarespace or Wix or whatever, Medium, you can find your feed probably in the settings area of your account. No username and password is required here. So, we'll click continue and then we'll click test trigger. And this should be yes, an observation I forgot to note. This is one of my briefs, right? And just to double check, raw category is briefs. So, I'm going to continue with the selected record. And before we get to blue sky, I want to make sure that I am formatting the post based on the category. And so for this, we're not going to use the filter. We're actually going to use paths. So we're going to add a paths step here. And we're going to split into paths. So our path A, let's name this. When we name this, click on the three dots briefs. So, this will be only continue if raw category contains briefs. Am I spelling that right? I always mess up the I and the E in this one. Uh, which I did somewhere. So, we'll click continue and then we run into Blue Sky. So, we'll create post. We'll connect my account. Blue sky account is casabona.org. We have our app specific password and then we'll click continue. So the text here is going to be the full text of the item which is description and then we can add the source which is going to be the raw link. This is not a reply. No embed. I just want a straight up link. So we'll click continue here. And this is what the post will look like. We'll click test step. Must not be longer than 300 graph. Uh okay. So, it can't be longer than 300. I'm going to guess this is characters. What a terrible error. Okay. So, let's see. This is definitely not going to work. I'm going to have to do some extra stuff on this. But, okay. So, this was sent. So, if we go over to blue sky. Oh, okay. So, what I did not catch is it's adding it adds something into the RSS feed. So uh we are going to use the formatter to remove that. I could also remove that on the RSS feed side but I'm not going to do that. So transform replace and then the input will be the description. And then if we actually look at the full text of the description here we'll remove that now is there. Oh here's what we actually want. Can remove that from the description. Right? We don't want raw description. We want just description. find this replace with nothing. Let's test this. Perfect. So now we'll go down here, create post, and we'll remove the description because now we want the formatted text. And I won't include the source here. We'll test this step. And then we'll go back to blue sky. Great. So this is working as I'd like. So now we have this. So now the path uh is we're going to make this the fall back. Okay. So fall back means that if this condition is not true, we're going to fall back to this path and we are going to use blue sky again and we're going to create a post. And the text here is going to be new post at new post on my blog. And then we are going to use the title and the link and we can make external link the embed here and act. Okay. So actually we can remove that and then we'll just add the link under URL. The title will be the title. We'll make that the description. Uh we won't include a thumbnail URL because I'm usually not including well I certainly didn't include any media in this one. All right. So now we'll uh skip this test because if we go to the fallback here, this is not going to work. But if we go up here and select a new test. Yeah, great. This is a good one. So we'll use this. We'll retest this step. Oh, so I wonder this is not going to work because it specifically uses the posts. Oh, but you know what? I can do the post and then title. Retest that. Fantastic. Continue. So, this one should not run. Retest filter would not have continued. Perfect. So, then we would go over here, create the post. We'll see what this looks like. Test the step. And that looks like it worked. Great. We can delete this because I've already posted that. All right. So, I'm going to call this ready to publish here. What I could do is is kind of add the same thing for Mastadon or other social networks, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to click publish. All right. And now we're all published. So, couple of notes here, right? Um I may run into an issue where the text I wrote for my brief is too long. And so, what I'd have to do is truncate, right? And I I would use the formatter for that. But I'm going to let this run as is because I do try to keep my briefs brief. If they are longer, then they become articles and thoughts. So, this was a great way for me to customize the way my blog posts appear on Blue Sky. They're not just generic links. And I'm really happy with that. So, again, if you want to get this and every automation that I am working on, you can go over to cassabona.org/youtube. If you liked this video, be sure to like and subscribe. you want to see me build an automation, leave a comment below. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, I hope you find some space in your week. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. Like I said, head over to cassabona.org/youtube to join my mailing list and get more automations and newsletters about building systems. If you want to see more fun content like this, you can click this video over here. Or if you want to, you can subscribe to the channel down here. Thanks so much for watching., YouTube Video GHkQoKn3q08, YouTube, 01kabxkmbzggqepcqdecwrq5kw.