IFTTT - tell me about it

Due to building a house in a fairly large subdivision, we get a lot of people coming to the door trying to sell anything from lawn care to alarms. Anytime the bell rings my dogs go nuts. It's then a battle to answer the door to tell them to please leave while keeping my dogs away from the door. It's chaos, and I get that it's my fault for not training the dogs better.

Anyways, I was looking at the Ring video doorbell. While reading reviews of the different Wifi doorbells I came across this neat little thing called IFTTT. It seems like it allows a lot of devices to work well together to perform sets of actions that I want it to (Turn on the porch light if the Ring sensor goes off). I get that I have to have the right device for the porch light, but it looks like a cool way to start up a smart home.

Is this the right way to approach it? At the moment, the things we are looking at adding to the house are cameras that we can monitor from our phones, the Wifi doorbell so I can interact with people without having to open the door, the ability to open our door using our phone (proximity or with a code if remote), a garage door opener that can be operated from our phone, and possibly a smart thermostat.

It's a tall order I realize, but the first thing is to get the doorbell. I just don't want to get something now that turns out to not be useful with everything else going forward. I like the idea of rules to make things happen, I just don't know much other than that at this point.

IFTTT has the jump on other internet of things tech because it's free and easy to use/integrate. When I first saw it, I immediately thought it directly addressed the missing pervasive, non-proprietary abstraction layer that keeps IoT from working for many people in the ways that they want. I still think it's great idea-wise, but implementation may not quite be up to your expectations depending on the devices you're using. For example, it can take several minutes for an action to be triggered on certain phones due to differences in alert handling in various sleep modes/power states. My advice is to try some recipes on your phone for existing apps that you use, and see how well it works.

I don't know about using it for home automation (my home isn't very automated) but I have seen people use IFTTT to do various things, including writing a novel.

I first saw IFTTT as a way to pipe email attachments into cloud-storage drives.

IFTTT has a lot of things that can attach to it, though honestly I find little use for most of them. I mostly use it for my Hue Lights, using various tools to change the light colors, give me alerts, and the such. It just adds a little layer of convenience, though most of the time they are never used.

I also have it set up to send me alerts on weather and certain RSS feed postings.

So many of the pre-published recipes just aren't what I need: files, recording, streaming, social, etc. IFTTT is find for what I use it for, but most everything I need for my (very simple) smart home is already handled through Amazon Echo and SmartThings. The latter seems capable to doing most of what you want.

I use it to automatically store image posts from Dead End Thrills (http://feeds.feedburner.com/deadendt...) in my Google Drive. I should probably just script that locally, though.

Just found out about this. Going to see if I can get my Echo to controller my security cameras.