Beemind Dreamwidth New Posts

[thechristophe]

Hey guys, I’m trying to set up a new Goal to blog more on my Dreamwidth blog.
The easy way to do this would be to monitor an RSS feed for new items, but my blog posts are password protected so this wouldn’t work.

I also thought maybe if I updated my blog via Gmail and then set up an IFTTT or Zapier trigger that could be a workaround, but a trigger for new ‘sent’ emails doesn’t seem to exist.

Any other ideas on how this could be done?

[drtall]

You indeed cannot trigger on sent emails, but if you can send an email you can always send it to a dummy account which has a trigger for received emails.

[thechristophe]

That could work, but I could easily game it by simply sending an email to that dummy account to avoid a derail.

[zorkian]

Hello! Dreamwidth actually supports authenticated RSS feeds, which can show protected content. If you’re willing to let ifttt or whomever see your content, you can just do something like:

https://mark.dreamwidth.org/data/rss?auth=digest

The RSS feed will then have whatever content you’re allowed to see. So, if you want to make it so that you only include non-private posts, you can create another account and give it access to only the posts you want to count, then use that account’s login credentials to view your journal’s RSS feed.

PS, also, happy to see a Dreamwidth user!

[thechristophe]

Thanks for the reply! I think I’ll need an idiots guide to setting this up
as I don’t understand how or where to incorporate my username and password
in ifttt to ensure the feed is always ‘visible’ to the applet/recipe.

[philip]

@thechristophe

That could work, but I could easily game it by simply sending an email to that dummy account to avoid a derail.

Of course you could.

But you won’t, because that’d defeat the whole point.

Even if you perfect this communication chain, you could publish a one-word post.

Even if you start enforcing minimum post lengths, you could paste in duplicate content and publish that.

There’s no solution that doesn’t require a certain amount of good behaviour from us the goal-setters.

On the plus side, you might find that once you automate this, you soon forget about the particular mechanism and that it’s even possible to game your own rules.

[dreev]

@philip

you won’t, because that’d defeat the whole point.

I call those loopholes you can drive an ice cream truck through.

Is daily weight under your direct control?

Or just go to work but don’t eat anything till you get home to your scale again! Totally. But this is a loophole I’m not (too) tempted to exploit. It’s an advantage of setting up mechanisms with your own future self that you won’t necessarily exploit every possible way to game the mechanism. It depends where the akrasia lies. Like maybe you use an IFTTT recipe to beemind how often you come within some radius of your gym. It’s a loophole, as I’ve said, big enough to drive an ice cream truck th…

[thechristophe]

Just for future searches, I was able to set this up using Zapier (not IFTTT). Zapier handles RSS feeds that require authentication much better so thanks for that link.