I orginally wrote this for Grinding, as more notes on Presence - how to stay in contact when you’re everywhere.

 

Now also available in:

• Brazilian Portugese

 

Creating your digital personal-assistant

 

The first thing you want to do is go to Twitter and create a new account. This is your digital personal-assistant. Choose a cool name and give it a pretty user-pic if you want.

 

Now set it to follow your twitter account, then logout and login to your twitter account and set that to follow your sexy new assistant.

 

Lastly and most importantly, log back into the assistant account and check the Protect my updates box; the tweets it will generate are for your eyes only.

 

Now get on over to Twitterfeed to create an account there. This is how your assistant’s tweets will be generated.

 

If you have a Livejournal, Vox, Wordpress, Blogger or Yahoo account follow the instructions to login.

 

Otherwise you’re going to have to create yourself an OpenID - do that and then login.

 

Now you’re ready to start plugging in RSS Feeds and get your instant notifications on. Almost.

 

Creating an email2rss address

 

As we’re about to learn, not every site has an RSS Feed for you comments. But every site has email notifications. And thanks to MailBucket you can convert your emails into an RSS Feed. (thanks MailBucket!)

 

First you need to choose an account name. MailBucket is pretty basic in this regards; there’s no duplicate username notification. So you have to use trial-and-error to see if the account name is free or not.

 

Just enter http://mailbucket.org/MAILBUCKET_USERNAME.xml into your browser and if it says “No messages are stored for this address” then you’ve got it.

 

Now add http://mailbucket.org/MAILBUCKET_USERNAME.xml to your Twitterfeed account.

 

The email address used to populate the RSS Feed is MAILBUCKET_USERNAME@mailbucket.org. But here’s where we add just one more layer:  I think this will work best if you use your Gmail account’s Filter functionality to auto-forward your emails to your mailbucket address.  This is for two reasons:  1) it will give you a backup archive and 2) it will give you a fall back in case MailBucket dies in the future.

 

Go to Settings→Filters→Create New Filter in your Gmail account.

 

Here’s the trick: in the To Address field you add GMAIL_USERNAME+email2rss@gmail.com and set it to Forward to MAILBUCKET_USERNAME@mailbucket.org, and to Archive them - you won’t need these emails appearing in your InBox, but they’ll still be there and be searchable.

 

GMAIL_USERNAME+email2rss@gmail.com is now your email2rss address.

 

Side-note: If you don’t have a Gmail address and/or don’t want to bother with another email account then don’t stress. You can create a Gmail account in minutes, do the above, then create another Filter to forward any all emails to your preferred email account. Or you can just use MAILBUCKET_USERNAME@mailbucket.org as your email2rss address.

 

OK, we’re nearly there.

 

Collecting the comments left on your works

 

This last part is pretty repetitious, but remember we’re doing all this now to make life simpler in the future.

 

Wordpress

Go to your blog’s front page. Look in your sidebar or at the bottom of the page, depending on your theme layout. Or you can just search for Comments RSS. Grab that url and add it to your Twitterfeed account.

 

Flickr

Login to Flickr. Go to You→Recent activity on your photos. There’s your feed at the bottom, add it to your Twitterfeed account.

 

Vox

Login to Vox. Go to Your Account and update it to use your new email2rss address. Now, go to Notifications and check all the boxes for Email Notifications.

 

Zannel

Login to Zannel. Go to Account. Go to manage account→edit and update it to use your new email2rss address. Then, go to alert settings and select yes for when I get a comment on my zannel and when someone comments on my updates.

 

VIRB

Login to VIBR. Go to Account/Settings→Account Info and update it to use your new email2rss address. Now, go to Account/Settings→Notification Settings and check all the boxes under Comments.

 

Livejournal

Login to Livejournal. Go to Account and update it to use your new email2rss address. Now, go to Account→Manage Notifications and tick the Someone comments in my journal, on any entry check box.

 

MySpace

Login to MySpace. Go to Edit Profile→Account Settings and update it to use your new email2rss address.

 

YouTube

Login to YouTube. Go to Account→Email Options and update it to use your new email2rss address.