Giving up for tonight. Hopefully what I have now should work for Facebook but not Twitter if tonight’s pattern holds. And it doesn’t hit LinkedIn like ping.fm did. But ping.fm was messing up the links (via Superfeedr) so whatever. It is late. I may revisit this again someday when I have more time. For now, it is what it is.
Well, I’ll be. At the moment anyway, it seems to be working for both Facebook and Twitter. Someday I’ll try to get LinkedIn working again. But not right now.
From BT via Facebook:
are you trying to get blog posts onto your wall? I can’t seem to get it to work. I import my blog, FB finds it, and then when I make a post nothing happens.
(8 hours ago )
From SM via Facebook:
OK, so yes, that is what I was trying to do, and I have several things working…
So, first of all, Facebook’s feature to import an RSS feed into “Notes” does work… sorta. The delay from when you post something can be anything from a few minutes to A COUPLE OF WEEKS though. When it finally gets to doing your RSS feed, it will catch up, so if it is two weeks behind, you’ll get all two weeks of posts all at once. It is pretty crap. It has the advantage of pulling in the full text of your RSS feed and at least the first image. Because of that it seems Facebook folks are much more likely to comment or “like” the notes that come out that way, so I have left that active, but the delay and unpredictable timeframes make it deeply unsatisfactory to me.
So…
Two methods… both seem to be generally working for me…
#1) Twitterfeed. Register with Twitterfeed and point it at your RSS feed. You can then set up both Twitter and Facebook as targets for it. It will check your RSS feed every 30 minutes or so. It will then update both twitter and your Facebook status with the title of your blog post, plus a bit.ly link to the post. Twitterfeed has a dashboard where you can see how many people are clicking on the bit.ly link as well. This currently looks like it is working fine for both Twitter and Facebook. (It did look for a bit like it was only getting Facebook and missing Twitter, but whatever the problem was seems to have been resolved.)
#2) Ping.fm. This has the advantage of being able to post to not just Twitter and Facebook, but also LinkedIn, AIM status and a bunch of other places as well. But the default way it has of getting RSS feeds via Superfeedr seems to randomly get the real URL of the post, the URL with the anchor to the comments on the post, or the URL to the RSS feed for the comments on the post, or occasionally even other links in the post. I was using it for a bit before I realized it was screwing up the links that way. That realization is what prompted my tests the other day. I think I have now found something that works for this, but this solution relies on my blog being a WordPress blog. Namely I’m using a WordPress plugin called Shorten2Ping which feeds my posts directly to ping.fm, bypassing my RSS feed and Superfeedr. Based on the first post I made after setting this up, it is working, although I’m still waiting for a few more to be sure it is working (testing only pushing to my AIM status) before I set it to publish to LinkedIn again, and consider if I want to turn off Twitterfeed in favor of this for Twitter and Facebook.
For both of the above I am only using it set to post the title and bit.ly URL. I think you can set up one or both of them to use longer excerpts to Facebook, but when I tried it once a few months ago it didn’t work right for me, so I went back to just the Title. I haven’t tried that lately, so there may be improvements that make it work better since.
Let me know if any of that ends up working for you!
(2 seconds ago)
From BT via Facebook:
ugh, what a pain! I noticed that the Notes RSS import didn’t seem to work right and you’ve corroborated that (probably saving me days of fiddling!). Now I’m trying a FB app called RSS Graffiti which purports to be able to grab your RSS feed and write to your wall when new items are found. So far seems to work.
I notice this morning that Notes did seem to pull a post after a few hours. Wouldn’t do it at all yesterday, but it worked overnight. I like the idea of twitterfeed and will definitely check that out.
I had been thinking to try to use FB in place of a blog (this is for our charity bike ride thing), but FB is so inadequate as a blogging tool that I’ve decided to go back to the blog. You have so much more control over how you post, mobile posting, image uploades, etc. I thought it would be a no-brainer to find some Blogger-to-Facebook solution, but apparently not…
(5 hours ago)
From SM via Facebook:
Hmmm…. I’ll have to check out RSS Graffiti.
Yeah, FB has some things it is OK at, but in the end, it is not a blog.
(2 seconds ago)
From SM via Facebook:
So I’ve been checking out RSS Graffiti. Seems to work great. Only downside over the Facebook Notes import is that with Notes you can tag people referenced in the note, doesn’t look like you can do that with the RSS Graffiti stuff.
But on the flip side, the Notes stuff is very unreliable in terms of how long it takes to get to Facebook. Sigh!
Having both TwitterFeed and RSS Graffiti going seems a bit annoying though, as each time I post, you end up with two updates for me for the two. So I may have to pick one or the other.
(2 seconds ago)
From SM via Facebook:
So, where I’m ending up, at least for the moment…
All content originates at abulsme.com. There is of course an RSS feed.
RSS Graffiti to push to Facebook
Twitterfeed to push to Twitter
Ping.fm to push to LinkedIn
Not perfect, but it all seems to be working.
(2 seconds ago)
From BT via Facebook:
looks like you were getting double posts on your wall, one from twitterfeed and one from rss graffiti — or was that still testing, since the very last one is just rss graffiti?
(2 minutes ago)
From SM via Facebook:
Essentially it was testing. When I was using Facebook Notes plus Twitterfeed (or ping.fm) I had both going and it kind of made sense. One would update my status in near real time, the other would eventually get around to posting the “whole thing”.
When I first set up RSS Graffiti I left Twitterfeed on to see if the same sort of result made sense. Twitterfeed actually updated my status, RSS Graffiti posted to the wall. BUt unlike Notes, which would often post many days later, these two would almost always post within a few minutes of each other.
So after letting them both post for a few posts and seeing what it looked like, I decided having both running was silly. I thought for Facebook the RSS Graffiti experience was better, so I left that one running and turned off Twitterfeed’s Facebook push. (Left it for Twitter though.)
The one thing I still miss about notes is the ability to tag people though. That was nice for when I posted a picture or comments or whatever about someone on Facebook.
(2 seconds ago)
From BT via Facebook:
OK makes sense. I just set up twitterfeed and will test. One of my preferred flows is to kick off everything with an emailed photo to flickr. That puts my photo on flickr, makes a Blogger blog post (with photo), writes to Facebook wall (fan page + personal) and tweets. That’s how I’ll be posting on my bike ride.
(2 hours ago)
From BT via Facebook:
Well, that worked quite well. Twitterfeed is pretty cool.
(about an hour ago)
From SM via Facebook:
I use that same Email->Flickr->Blog route in almost every case where I’m just posting a picture and a caption. It is very convenient. So I guess I lied about everything originating at my blog. I guess in that case even though I guess it is actually true, I don’t think of Flickr as the “home” for that content, it just happens to be an easy way to get it to my blog…
If I’m posting more than about a sentence with the picture though, or if the image is supporting to a larger post rather than the main point, I’ll often put the image up via the WordPress interface instead. I’ll also do that whenever the image is one that I don’t have permission to post using my default license terms on Flickr. I know I can change that over there, but I would forget to change it. :-) Of course, the same license terms are on abulsme.com, and I definitely don’t change those, so oops. :-)
Glad twitterfeed is working for you. Yup, pretty neat. :-)
(2 seconds ago)
From BT via Facebook:
Yah, I only use the flickr route for mobile blogging with photos; e.g. while out on a bike ride. That came out of my experience in 07 while photoblogging via cellphone. Then I was mms’ing photos directly to Blogger which theoretically worked. However in practice if there was any communication mishap the post would get created with a broken photo link and there was no retry/recovery other than to fix it from a computer. (Pre smartphone days). In 08, flickr worked perfectly.
(3 hours ago)
From SM via Facebook:
Yeah, from mobile it is a really handy way of doing it. I use it even when I’m at a full fledged computer though if I’m just posting the image and a caption, as it is still easier.
The only thing is that I’ve never been able to get tagging via the email quite right. And even if I get it to apply the right tags in Flickr, those don’t get carried over to WordPress. So I always end up going back at the next convenient time and applying whatever tags I wanted on the picture.
(2 seconds ago)