Use Azure Logic Apps and RSS to Create a Simple Post Reminder on Social Media

In this blog post, I will show you how to create an RSS Feed/WordPress Post Reminder with Azure Logic Apps, which you can use to post to various Social Media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ve probable seen a post like this with a reminder to check out my yesterday’s blog post: https://twitter.com/DevSecNinja/status/1084815812232388613?s=20 This is all works automatically by using Azure and Azure Logic Apps. Azure Logic Apps is just pulling the RSS Feed of my blog, waiting for 24 hours and publishing a tweet on Twitter. It’s really easy to set up as most blog sites and Content Management Systems (CMS) have a built-in RSS-feed. Let me show you how to set this up.

Requirements

• An Azure Subscription
  • I’m using a Visual Studio Enterprise license, but a trial or Pay-As-You-Go Subscription will do just fine.
  • Based on the cost history, this Azure Logic App construction seems to cost around € 0,00 and € 0,08.
• An RSS Feed from a site like WordPress
  • To get the URL to your RSS feed, try yourdomain.com/feed or feed.xml. My WordPress.com blog is hosting an RSS feed on https://DevSecNinja.com/feed/.
• A Social Media account like Twitter
  • You need to setup a connection between Azure Logic Apps and Twitter. Just follow the instructions in the blog post to get you started.

Quick Start Tutorial

1. Login on the Azure Portal.
2. Click on Create a resource and search the Marketplace for Logic App. Click on Logic App. A new blade will open. Click the Create button.
3. Specify:
   1. Name - e.g. RSSFeedPostReminder or WordPressPostReminder
   2. Subscription - select your Azure subscription
   3. Resource Group - create a new one called “LogicApps” or use an existing.
   4. Location - specify the region near you. E.g. West Europe
   5. Keep the Log Analytics switch to Off
4. Click Create. The Logic App will be provisioned for you which can take a couple of minutes.
5. Click on the bell icon to see the status of the deployment in the Notifications section:
6. When the Logic App has been provisioned successfully, click on it. This will open the Logic App.
7. Click the Edit button. This will open the Logic Apps Designer.
8. You can now add new steps to your Logic App. In my case, I have the following steps defined:
   1. “When a feed item is published” - When a new post is available on my blog
   2. “Delay” - Wait for 1 day
   3. “Post a tweet” - Post a tweet on Twitter and use the featured image of my blog post.
9. This should look something like this:
10. Be creative! Think about also posting to Facebook or Microsoft Teams. Or maybe you want to send your blog posts to newsletter subscribers. It’s all possible.

Enhance your Azure Logic Apps skills?

Check out the Azure Logic Apps website and documentation on Microsoft Docs. Thanks for reading my blog post. I hope that this post helped you by creating a new Logic App. Let me know if you have other cool steps to share!