Hi there fellow PbPs,
wouldn't it be great if you could get push notifications on your phone if someone posted a new gameplay/discussion/recruitment post in one of your threads?
Well lucky you, there is a way to do this!
It requires a bit of work so I thought I would coble together a quick tutorial of how to get the various parts working.
1. Preparations/Requirements:
- A smartphone running Android/Applethingy that is compatible with the IFTTT App (search it in the respective play store and install)
- An IFTTT account (you can actually sign in with Google/facebook if you want to), just go to the IFTTT Homepage and sign up
2. Getting PbP-Rss-Feed link:
- Navigate to any page of the campaign you want to get notifications for
- In the upper right corner of the page, there should be 1-3 tiny orange icons with a wifi-like white symbol in it (the RSS icon)
- Each of those will bring you to a new page, one each for Discussion, Recruitment and Gameplay (if you hover over the symbol, it will tell you which one - or you could simply follow the links and figure it out there)
- Once you found the one you're interested in, copy its URL from the adress bar of your browser (it should look similar to this: paizo.com/community/forums/campaigns/general&xml=atom)
3. Set up Rss-Feed Notification Applet in IFTTT:
- Go to the IFTTT homepage and sign in (actually you can do this from the app as well)
- Create a new applet (e.g. by going to create page)
- As + this element select 'RSS Feed' (the list is long, but you can search for it) and as trigger use 'New Feed Item'
- On the next page, it asks for the Rss-Feed to monitor. Paste the URL from Step 2 here.
- IFTTT will check the URL (and warn you if you copied an invalid link) and then returns to the if-then screen
- As the + that element, search for 'Notification' and select it.
- It will ask you whether you want rich or small notifications. Choose whatever you like. I usually use small notifications, as I prefer to read the posts in my own browser.
- In the next screen you can adjust how the notification would look like. You can usually just skip this and use the defaults but if you want to, there is a lot of stuff you can change and add here.
- The final page will let you check your input and then you're done.
Once set up, you should receive Push-Notification on your phone within something like 10-30 minutes of a new post.
To add additional pages, simply repeat steps 2 and 3 for any thread you want to monitor and receive notifications for.
Disclaimer: I did this a while back, so the whole setup of IFTTT app and account is a bit lost in memory, so there may be one or two steps I missed there but I am sure it will be easy to figure out.
Let me know if it works for you and how you like it.
Enjoy and game on :-)
