Two exciting new things have happened recently over at IFTTT, our favourite web automation service. Firstly, they partnered with Pushover in order to allow IFTTT users to push notifications to their smartphones. Secondly, they partnered with ESPN for the duration of the Olympics so that IFTTT users could get notifications of medals or big news from the Olympic games.

What this means for us is that it’s really easy to set up IFTTT recipes to update you via push notifications whenever your favourite country wins an Olympic medal, whenever someone breaks a world record, whenever someone wins gold or if there’s some other huge news. All of this goes directly to your phone the instant ESPN updates their website. Want to know how? Read on!

Install Pushover On Your Phone

Get the Pushover app for Android or iOS for around 4€ ($3.99)and get your account set up. Head over to Pushover to find out more about how it works.

Add ESPN And Pushover Channels To Your IFTTT Account

Presuming you already have an IFTTT account (if not, why not?), you now need to activate the ESPN and Pushover channels. The ESPN channel will just need you to click “Activate”, whereas the Pushover channel asks you to enter a very long unique key to verify your phone. To find your unique code, open the pushover app on your phone and go into the menu settings for the app. You may cut and paste if you’re using IFTTT on your phone, but if not you’ll need to type the whole thing out.

Try These Olympic Pushover Recipes

Now that everything’s ready to go, you can either check out the ESPN triggers and create your own recipes, or you can try out these recipes which use Pushover to keep you updated about the most interesting Olympic results.

You can set IFTTT to push a notification for whenever your favourite country wins a medal using this recipe (just change the country to your favourite before you click on “Use This Recipe”).

IFTTT will push-notify you whenever anyone breaks a world record using this recipe.

Olympic recipes can also be created to notify you whenever there’s any major news from ESPN. Plus, you don’t have to be notified by Pushover. For instance, you can collect information in Evernote, post links to Facebook, have details emailed to you or sent by SMS. See all the public ESPN Olympic IFTTT recipes here.

More Things To Do Using Pushover

There are many great public recipes you can use which will send push notifications to your phone via Pushover. Here’s a few of the best I’ve found.

This recipe will send a high-priority push notification (which overrides regular phone sound settings) whenever you receive an email from one particular address.

A recipe which will send a push notification if it’s going to snow tomorrow.

This recipe notifies you of any breaking news which is tweeted by @breakingnews.

A recipe to send push notifications whenever Netflix has new titles.

More Cool IFTTT Tricks

Here’s a few more articles on IFTTT you might like to check out:

• Using IFTTT To Automate All Your Facebook Photos & Video
• 5 More Awesome ifttt Recipes You Can Start Using Today
• 10 Great ifttt Recipes To Automate Your Web Life
• Sync Posts Between Facebook, Twitter, Google+ & Your Links

Obviously, it’s possible to get push notifications from any RSS feed, Twitter user, or other action on a social network you’ve activated. What else can you come up with?