Thursday, January 24, 2008, 6:19pm
Using Google Alerts with Gmail and WordPress
I make fairly extensive use of all the Google services. One of my favorite “workflows” requires a combination of Google Alerts, Gmail, and WordPress.
Google Alerts
In a nutshell, Google Alerts lets you monitor specific phrases and keywords and sends you an email alert whenever a blog, video, or website in Google’s database mentions it. So, for example, here are a few active alerts.
As you can see, I’ve set up alerts for many of the things that interest me. You can be notified whenever someone mentions your name, your blog, your local town, etc.. Then you choose the frequency that Google will alert you, either all at once at the end of the day or as often as new content arrives. So what do I do with these alerts?
On to Gmail
First, I have Google send alerts as they happen to my personal Gmail account. Then a Gmail filter applies the “Alerts” label to the message, forwards the item on to my WordPress publishing email address, and then archives the item (skipping the inbox). It will end up looking something like this.
WordPress Integration
A while back I created a special WordPress installation decked out with plug-ins and custom code that I wrote to make it behave much like a personal nerve center that I can use to store information. In its simplest form, it acts as a diary of anything and everything I need to remember, and it sits on a private domain name with a required password.
After Gmail forwards a copy of the Google Alert to my “secret” WordPress email address, the news item is automatically parsed and published, immediately giving me a searchable copy stored in my knowledge base that will appear along the right sidebar as a “recent alert”.
This post represents just one way to use Google Alerts, Gmail, and WordPress together to solve an information problem. I want to keep a copy of the Alert tagged in Gmail, but I’d also like it to appear in my nerve center in case I want to make a note or comment on it later. Google lets me do both.
In a future post I’ll outline my “nerve center” in much more detail, including the plug-ins used (or custom written) and the design.
Photo by jepoirrier.
1 Comment on "Using Google Alerts with Gmail and WordPress"...
Mark at 6:19pm on Thursday, January 24, 2008
we used google alerts for this purpose for a long time, but needed a way to monitor all content on a page at once. We think CopyAlerts may be an easier way to monitor the entire content of a web page by just entering your email address and the url to monitor.