I recently read Trello as a CMS, about how The Changelog manages the content of their newsletters within Trello.
I had been thinking about automating my Twitter account recently and this article sparked me into action.
Why don't I automate Twitter with Trello? I'm already in Trello every day – I use it to manage my personal todo list, upcoming features for Blocks, and blog post ideas in various stages of completion – so why not create a board with upcoming tweets, too?
And bonus: I love building things. This would be fun.
So I created a board, dug into the Trello API, and started playing around.
Here's what I ended up with. I now have a board called Twitter Automation. It has a list called Queue, and every weekday at about 9am, a program takes the top card from the Queue, posts the description to my Twitter account, and moves the card to a Posted YYYY-MM board.
I also have an Unread list for articles I haven't read yet and still need to decide if I'm going to share them. And I have an Ideas list for articles I've read and tweets that I've composed but still need to put in the queue. I don't know, maybe Ideas isn't necessary and I'll drop it later. We'll see.
Truth be told, I probably had more fun building this than the actual value I'll get out of it.
And that's fine. Sometimes I just need to build something for the joy of building something.