How to schedule pinning from your Society6 collection

2023: Withdrawn due to Society6 action to prevent web page scraping, even when benign and positive 😞

For this tutorial, if you want to follow along you’ll need:

  • A Pinterest business account
  • An IFTTT account
  • A Society6 collection with plenty (40+) of products
  • Optional: your Society6 curator id – if you have one

Start the CPanel

First off, open the Society6 Nifty CPanel (opens in new window) and put in your curator id, if you have one. If not, leave the default.

Getting the collection identifier

Next, get the identifier for your collection from Society6. Visit the collection you want to use as the source and copy it from the address bar as shown:

Paste it into the CPanel

Paste the collection identifier, replacing what was there before and press enter. After a short pause, you’ll see them appear at the bottom:

Now choose the nIFTTTy Scheduler option in Step 2

First open the panels as shown:

Ready to launch the nIFTTTy Scheduler

With the panels showing you can now launch the nIFTTTy Scheduler:

Setting up the nIFTTTy Scheduler

Now choose the days of the week you want for your pins and the times for them to pin.

Get the feed url for IFTTT

Here’s a schedule set to pin on all days using the ‘spread evenly over 24 hours’ default

Get to IFTTT and click the button to make a new applet

Once you’re on your My Applets page, click the button to make a new applet:

The If This part

IFTTT phrases its applets like this “if this (some input condition) then that (some action down a channel).

For our applet, think of it as “If a new feed item appears on this feed url then pin to Pinterest on this board these details from the item”

Finishing off the If This part

After choosing the RSS Feed service you tell it to trigger on a New feed item:

Pasting in the Feed url

You’ll then be able to paste in that feed url you copied from the nIFTTTy Scheduler:

Finish off the IF This part

Almost ready to start the Then That part. Click the Create trigger button

On with the Then That part for the pinning

Now that the IF This part is complete, we’re ready to tell it about the action we want carried out when the input condition is met: pinning to a Pinterest board

Choosing Pinterest for the That part

There’s a lot to choose from, so rather than scrolling through them all to find Pinterest just type pin into the search box:

Choose Add Pin to board – the only choice

Almost there….

Fill in the Pin details

Give a board name to pin to. It’s case sensitive so make sure of your typing! If you give a name of a board that doesn’t exist, a new one will be created automatically behind the scenes on the very first pin.

Finally, name your Applet

Give it a meaningful name so when you come back to it later, you’ll know what it does.

Done! Your new applet summary screen

Once you click the Finish button you’ll be taken to your new applet’s summary screen:


🤓 Useful to know for geeks…

The feed url produced by the nIFTTTy Scheduler does something very special – it always produces an empty feed unless a timeslot is active. Active means that it’s one of your chosen days, the timeslot start has been reached and 30 minutes haven’t yet passed since then.

If one is active, then the item that appears in the feed is the ‘next due’ one.

How does it know which one is due?

It’s a matter of sums:

  • It knows when the feed url was first made because it’s (encoded) in the feed url
  • It knows what days of the week it’s scheduled for because they’re (encoded) in the feed url as well
  • It can work out how many scheduled days have elapsed since then
  • It knows how many timeslots you’ve chosen, again because they’re in the feed url
  • Doing the sums on those details gives an item number to use, and it’s the item at that position in the collection that then appears in the feed

So when a timeslot is active, the next due item from your collection is picked and will appear in the feed if it’s requested. During an active timeslot, when IFTTT checks (requests) the applet’s feed url, it doesn’t get an empty feed, it gets a feed with that one item in it.

ℹ️ IFTTT checks an applet’s feed every 10 or 15 minutes or so, and that accounts for a timeslot being 30 minutes long – to give IFTTT time to check it!

As long as the applet’s not seen that item before, IFTTT will pin it where you told it to.

⚠️ Be aware that if you make your schedule after some timeslots have already passed for the day, your first pin won’t come from the start of your collection.

For example, if I make a schedule at 11:00am and

  • I’ve set the schedule to all days
  • I’ve set timeslots of 6:30am, 8:00am, 9:30am, 1:00pm and so on

then here’s a surprise – the first possible item to be pinned from the collection will actually be the fourth because the first three timeslots have already passed.

If I’d made the schedule at 5:00am (and finished making the applet soon after) then the first item to be pinned would be the first in the collection.

Failures

The internet’s not perfect and sometimes glitches occur while one service is trying to communicate across it with another. It’s a fact of life.

IFTTT doesn’t know about active timeslots, all it does is keep checking the applet’s feed url every so often. If it fails when a timeslot isn’t supposed to be active. No worries just ignore the fact. No harm done.

It could fail when a timeslot is active but again, not to worry because it will retry a few minutes later. The chances of two such failures in a row when a timeslot is active is very, very low. So low, you can ignore it.

Eventually, when your collection has had all its items pinned, the feed url will never again produce an item. At that point you’ll see nothing but failures and it’s time to delete (or switch off) that applet.