Blog to Glip Zap
Keeping the team informed can be a challenge. You put together an amazing blog post (like this one), you tell your team to check out the blog, and sure enough — nothing happens.
But what if there was an easier way to keep your coworkers updated? What if you could put your blog posts or updates in one place where they could find them at any time (well, obviously that’s the point of your blog — but let’s be honest… how many of your coworkers will actually check the blog when looking for information?).
So what’s a possible solution that takes less than 5 minutes? Putting your blog posts into a Glip Channel automatically using Zapier of course!
Step 1: Poll the RSS
Step one is pretty easy. Just find the Zapier RSS Zap and select “New item in Feed.”
Step 2: Enter the URL
Probably the hardest step of them all — the next step is to find and enter the RSS url for your blog. Usually you’ll find an HTML tag that looks something like this:
<link id=”feedLink” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”https://medium.com/feed/ringcentral-developers">
And then enter the URL accordingly:
Unless you have a super special blog, you can skip username, password, and the trigger section and go ahead and click “continue.”
Finally, click through the next steps, and choose one of the three options for feed items from Zapier to finish the first app.
Step 3: The Formatter
The only problem you noticed with the feed is that unless you have a teaser or a short version of the blog post, you have a LOT of text… like a WHOLE BLOG POST of text. That’s not good.
Using the Zapier Formatter, however, we can shorten the text to make the post, well actually readable.
To do this search for “Formatter by Zapier” and select this action.
Now choose “text” since we’re modifying the text and click continue.
Step 4: Truncate the string
The next screen you see will show you a single dropdown — with a LOT of options. You can convert markdown to HTML, convert to ASCII, get an email, lowercase, pluralize, remove tags… I mean, you name it! In fact, you can use the Formatter again and again to do all these things.
But for this stage, we simply want to select “Truncate.” Once you do, you’ll see the Truncate specific fields. Select the description or content field for your blog, enter the number of characters you want to limit the text to, and select whether you want to append an ellipsis (…) to the end if the text is actually truncated.
Finally click “continue.”
Step 5: Test the step and click “Add a Step”
Test the step to make sure it truncates your text correctly, and then click “Add a step” to post to Glip.
Step 6: Let’s add in Glip
Now select the Glip App and choose “Create a new post on Glip” and click “Continue.”
Step 7: Connect Your Glip Account
The next step will ask you to Connect an Account. However, when you click on “Connect an Account” it will ask you for an integration ID.
Now switch to the Glip app. At the bottom you should see a link for “Integrations.” Click on Integrations, and then scroll down and click on Zapier:
Once you click on Zapier, you will be prompted to choose a conversation or create a team:
You should now see your Zapier Integration ID:
If you don’t see your Zapier integration ID, look for the Zapier icon in the right pane under “My Integrations.” You can retrieve the ID at anytime by clicking on the Zapier link there.
Now go back to Zapier and enter the Integration ID:
Click “Yes Continue” and then click “Save + Continue.”
Step 8: Enter your information
Now we’ll enter the Activity line (something like “New Blog Post”), select the Subject line, the body text, and add an icon (optional).
To do this, we’ll select data from steps 1 and 2 like so:
Make sure you add the link to the Body section (with a return or two between them), otherwise you’ll only be posting the teaser text of the blog, with no way for them to actually visit it!
Step 9: Test and Finish Up!
Now for the most fun step. Click Continue, and then “Send Test to Glip.”
Switch to Glip, and you should see the latest blog post there:
If successful, click “Finish,” name your app, and turn the Zap on. That’s it — your coworkers may now be able to ignore your blog, but can they ignore your Glips? We think not!
