A well known Linkedin influencer crops up in my feed pretty frequently. The influencer often posts screenshots of tweets that they've made. They're not the only one, there are a number of posters that do similar things. I find it interesting becuase Twitter-Linkedin cross posting was a very early integration that I recall.
In fact, if you head over to your LinkedIn Preferences you can connect Twitter and cross post automatically. I would have thought that most things would want to be cross posted, but then, I'm not an influencer.
I don't like inefficent processes. I dislike the feeling that I'm wasting time. I like automating small things, because it turns a boring action (copy & paste) into an interesting problem to solve (how do I do the thing). With that in mind, I'm going to describe my workflow for publishing a post on this blog. I don't publish very often, but when I do, I don't want to be copying and pasting anything.
I write my blog entries in Markdown, essentially, some minimal markup that can easily get converted into HTML. My website is generated in static site generator called Pelican. I use git for version control, which I self-host with Gitea. So far, not much automted. I can't really automate the writing of blog posts.
Now, the automation bits. The Gitea repository syncs every 8 hours with a Github repository. When the Github repository gets the latest code from Gitea, Netlify pulls the website from Gitea. Within the website all the blog posts are included in the RSS feed. Zapier gets the most recent blog post from the RSS feed and does three things: posts on the CoraxFM Linkedin company page, creates a tweet, and a Medium story.
I think that the trouble with some of the automations is that many people cannot even imagine what can be automated with relative ease. Zapier is a no-code solution to automation. You could replace the version control/static site stuff that here with Wordpress. Or anything else that supports an RSS feed.
What processes might you have to automate?
LAST MINUTE UPDATE: The funny thing about this post is that attempting to push the respository to Gitea failed. I couldn't connect to my server at all. Trying to connect to my server through both my laptop and phone didn't work, either 4g or wifi. I forgot that I had set the firewall to limit ssh connections from to particular IP addresses. Automation can solve some problems, but can introduce others too!