Setting up AO3 Feeds on Tumblr
I’ve worked out a pretty easy way to get AO3 fandom notifications on tumblr using the IFTTT service, yay. :) If there’s a fandom where you’d like to get all the story notifications on your dash, here’s how to do it:
1) See if someone else has already done all the work for you by looking in the #ao3feed announcement tag or just seeing if there’s an ao3feed-[fandom] blog already set up. If so, follow that blog. You’re done!
2) If not, set up a tumblr blog and named it ao3feed-[fandom] so other people can find it easily (eg, I’ve created ao3feed-thor for the Thor movie). You can use whatever theme you want. Keep in mind the entries are all going to be plain text.
3) Go to ifttt, create an account for this feed, activate the Tumblr channel, and select the new ao3feed-whatever blog as the blog that the account will post to. (At the time I write this, ifttt.com only allows you to post to one tumblr blog per account, so you have to make a new ifttt account for each feed you want to set up. Annoying!)
4) Now you need the AO3 feed URL: browse to the fandom that you want to follow on the AO3 and copy the URL from the RSS feed:
5) Go to the ifttt recipe I’ve created for AO3 feeds and REPLACE the Thor feed URL with the one you just copied.
6) Also add one or more tags for your fandom:
7) Click “Use Recipe”
8) Hover anxiously over the Tumblr blog refreshing until the first story appears. (This won’t happen until someone posts a new story to that fandom tag! So if you have made a feed for Super Obscure Fandom you may have a wait, alas.)
9) Tell people you’ve set up a new feed under the #ao3feed announcement hashtag!
