For quite awhile now, maybe a year, maybe less, dunno, but for awhile, I have had the Facebook “Notes” app set to import the RSS feed from my blog. So basically each of my posts would show up as a Note in facebook. This seemed to work pretty well. My posts would usually show up on Facebook an hour or two after I posted them on my blog. And I started to get more comments to my posts via Facebook than directly on my blog. Which is cool I guess.

But lately, the last month or so, the delay between me posting and things showing up on Facebook was getting longer and longer. A few hours turned into half a day. That turned into about a day. Then it was several days. Then a little over a week ago I noticed that none of my posts had moved over in almost a week. So I went in to the Notes application and reentered the address of my RSS feed. It responded by quickly importing several of my recent posts it hadn’t gotten yet.

But then I made more posts. It has once again been a few days (not quite a week yet) and nothing has come through. So I think I am done with that method.

I’ve been using TwitterFeed for quite a few months to dump my blogging into Twitter. Turns out it can do the same for Facebook. (I could also add a level of indirection and go from Twitter to Facebook, but…) Anyway, I set it up a little bit ago, and see it already posted my most recent blog post.

Unlike the notes, it is just a headline and a link to the post on my blog, rather than a full copy of the whole blog post. Guess that means less people will actually read any of them, but I guess that’ll be OK. If you are one of the folks who looks at my posts only through Facebook, you’ll just have to click through. Or just go to Abulsme.com directly of course.

For now, I haven’t actually turned off the notes feed. In theory it is still supposed to work. I’m curious if it will ever start posting stuff again. Maybe it will, just with a two week delay or some such. We’ll see. If it does start doing something again, I’ll probably turn off one or another method of doing this to avoid duplicates depending on how things are going at the time.

Of course, I know there is also the idea that just having the same things posted to my blog, Facebook and Twitter defeats the purpose of them as separate platforms, and maybe I should just use each of them in distinct ways. Maybe. But as far as I’m concerned, my blog, where I have full control of what is in it, I have the backups, I could switch hosting whenever I want, etc, etc, etc is my single place for anything I want to put online. Everywhere else can have pointers back, but I’m not going to put stuff I really care about in someone else’s system as the primary place it lives. Pointers linking back are just fine. It is bad enough that I am using Flickr and YouTube for some pictures and videos. But the original copies of all that content remains safely in my care. I just use them for convenience. :-)

Anyway, we’ll see how TwitterFeed works for this purpose. Theoretically, with this posts on my blog should always show up on Facebook (and of course Twitter) within 30 minutes. That will be better than what the Notes import was doing even when it was working, let alone when it started lagging by days… if it is even working any more.

If anybody has any thoughts on this way of doing things, or on alternative ways to accomplish this kind of thing, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!