Say Hello to the Drinking Birdie

If you are like many people – you may have looked at the Can It Be Automated logo and wondered – what’s up with the bird?!? Well, we’re here to answer your question!

Automation has been around for ages. Even before the digital age, man has been trying to find ways to save time and energy through the use of clever machines and tools. When working on the idea for an agency that focused on building automations for people, we struggled on what to call it. We went through dozens of ideas, but the one that we kept coming back to was the idea of the Drinking Bird

How It Works:

TRIGGER

• Give the birdie a drink (dip its head in water)

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

• When water evaporates from the fuzz on the Dippy Bird’s head, the head is cooled.
• The temperature decrease in the head condenses the methylene chloride vapor, decreasing the vapor pressure in the head relative to the vapor pressure in the abdomen.
• The greater vapor pressure in the abdomen forces fluid up through the neck and into the head.
• As fluid enters the head, it makes the Dippy Bird top-heavy.
• The bird tips. Liquid travels to the head. The bottom of the tube is no longer submerged in liquid.
• Vapor bubbles travel through the tube and into the head. Liquid drains from the head, displaced by the bubbles.
• Fluid drains back into the abdomen, making the bird bottom-heavy.
• The bird tips back up.

LIMITATIONS

While the current workflow is some pretty slick automation, this pre-built automation has a limit of one re-hosted image per article. That is, the first image in the article will be stripped out, loaded into the WordPress site for hosting and Google URLs will be removed. Other images in the article will remain in the post, however, they will retain the Google image hosting properties. If you need this removed please let us know and we can set up a custom automation for you which will work for multiple images.

VARIATIONS

Looking to extend this automation? Here are a couple of suggestions!

1. An automated content approval process that sends your post through a number of approvers and moves it into this folder once everyone has approved it.
2. A content distribution automation which takes new blog posts (like the one you just made!) and cross-posts it to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media channels