Populating your personal bot, the easy way

Nov 1, 2016 · 4 min read

TL;DR — I used this method to create a simple personal bot that can be updated by just using the ‘Save to Pocket’ Chrome Extension. It took me about an hour in total. So yes, its basic(ish). Screenshots at bottom of the post.
You can see it here

I thought about creating a personal bot a while ago. But frankly, I didn’t think I had enough interesting content to continually put out there — plus the effort of adding content to the bot.

Then I thought (+ tweeted)

The character limit didn’t really explain it very well…

Basically I wanted to use the ‘Save to Pocket’ Chrome Extension, to auto-populate content for my own personal bot.

This way I could add things with one click! I could add things like; what I’m reading, what I’m listening to (music + podcasts), what products I like and things of that nature.

It doesn’t have to be something useful to anyone except me really. I save things to Pocket using the Chrome Extension all the time, but now that just means it adds to my collective feed in my bot. Useful for me anyway!

It’s pretty simple, here’s how you can do it too…(using Chatfuel)

Download ‘Save to Pocket’ Chrome Extension
Learn the basics of content blocks and how to link them in Chatfuel — its very straight forward
Add a content block ‘Plugins’
Select ‘Zapier’ from the Zapier Integrations at the bottom. This will create the block.

Hit ‘Create a zap’ — (create a Zapier account if you don’t have one)

Choose your trigger App — Pocket
Select ‘New Tagged Item’ — (I’ll show you how to do an ‘everything’ feed at the bottom of the post)
Link Pocket account
Type in a tag (you need to make sure that you already have saved a webpage with a tag with the Pocket Chrome Ext.). For example I added ‘Podcasts’ when saving a page with a podcast I listened to.
If you have done that correctly it should say ‘Test Successful!’ — yay
Choose Action App — Chatfuel for Facebook
‘Select Chatfuel for Facebook Account’ — hit ‘create new account’, in the pop up you need to paste the Chatfuel key given in your Chatfuel dashboard…
When editing the template, this is up to you. Hit the + on the right. I go with a similar variation of; Cards title: Resolved Title, Subtitle: Excerpt, Card URL: Resolved URL. — You can always play around with this here to make it fit what you want.
It should then show you what content you are pulling in, and if it looks good then go for it. That’s it!
You may need to do some testing and tweaking but that is essentially it!
The tagging system allows to split content into different sections, e.g. Read, Music, Podcasts etc.

For an EVERYTHING feed it’s a lot simpler

This pulls in everything you save to pocket in one big feed. I quite like this version. Also people can subscribe to it too.
Hit RSS Import on ‘Plugins with subscription’ when adding your content block

Go to https://getpocket.com/privacy_controls/ and select which feed you want to use.
Make your feed public to make it easier for yourself…
Enter the feed URL into the content block on Chatfuel
Voila, you’re done.

(you can use password protected feed but its more long-winded and I’m not going into it here)