So for some time now I’m using Todoist as my personal means of organization and (at least try to) practise GTD. It really helps me to stay organised (mostly) and keep focus, and even so non-free I’m using Todoist as it has both a nice and user-friendly Web UI as well as an Android App (both working well offline).

And then there’s Huginn which is a self-hosted IFTTT on steroids, which I’m also using for quite a while now. Yet so far I didn’t connect both tools.

Then there was that idea:

I tend to just “like” stuff over on Twitter to flag it for me to eventually “Read Somewhen”. Yet I use Todoist to keep a GTD-style somewhen maybe list.

So wouldn’t it be cool if tweets I liked would automatically pop up on my Todoist Inbox (at least if they are likely “stuff to read”)?

well, so I quickly noticed that Huginn doesn’t have a Todoist Agent and I’m not at all proficient in Ruby … anyways I gave it a try … so now there is huginn_todoist_agent :-)

In order to “click together” the Twitter-to-Todoist forwarder I created a scenario using three agents:

  1. Twitter Favorites Agent to continuously retrieve my Twitter favs and create an event for each and everyone
  2. a Trigger Agent consuming these events and filtering out stuff that’s not likely “to be read”
  3. last but not least the my own Todoist Agent configured with a “Huginn” label so I know where the tasks come from

The Trigger Agent is configured like this

{
  "expected_receive_period_in_days": "5",
  "keep_event": "false",
  "rules": [
    {
      "type": "regex",
      "value": "^http",
      "path": "entities.urls[0].url"
    },
    {
      "type": "!regex",
      "value": "^https://twitter.com/attn/status/",
      "path": "entities.urls[0].expanded_url"
    }
  ],
  "message": "Potential someday read: "
}

… it simply excludes all Tweets that either have no URL at all (so nothing to read there) or Tweets just mentioning other Tweets.

Using my “custom” Todoist Agent with Huginn’s docker container is pretty simple: you just provide an environment variable ADDITIONAL_GEMS with value huginn_todoist_agent and it auto-installs it during first start of the container :-)