A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

I’ve been testing the cross-posting workaround I found for about a week. The idea is, you compose just one post and you can replicate it on any number of your other blogging accounts. These days, people would have multiple social networking accounts (Facebook, MySpace, Multiply, Friendster etc.) and frankly it’s a pain to logging in and out of different accounts with essentially the same people on your network saying the exact same things.

“Why bother?”, you might ask. Because these days ‘googling yourself’ isn’t just a dirty word any more. Employers and co-workers have steadily relied on the web to find out more about people they encounter. Your online reputation becomes as important as your reputation ‘IRL’ (in real life). Leaving your brand (your name, or your domain) untended in these social networking sites could be a Bad Idea - someone could use your name or your brand to post something against what you’re supposed to be. Or worse — someone hijacks your brand with the sole purpose of attacking it.

I slipped up on this once and now I’m forced to live with some guy with bad taste in music and awful design sensibilities.

So the cross-posting work-around works like this:

(BTW, credit where credit is due - I found this work-around on: machtung.multiply.com)

My implementation went like this -

Requirements and Limitations:

1. The originating post comes from the latest Wordpress install.
2. Said Wordpress-powered site has a plug-in called Post Notification (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-notification/) installed.
3. Attempted to cross-post to: Multiply, Friendster, Blogger, Vox accounts.
4. Only works on: Multiply, Blogger, Vox.
5. I didn’t write the Post-Notification plug-in. If you have any questions about its usage, go directly to the author’s site at http://pn.strübe.de/

Step 1.

Download, install & activate the Wordpress plug-in: Post Notification. Make sure all minimum
requirements are met. Log-out and proceed to:

Step 2.

Log-in to your other accounts:

2.A Blogger: Sign In –> your blog’s Settings –> Email tab –> at the Mail-to-Blogger Address, fill in the email address (ex: yourbloggeraccount.YourEmailAddress@blogger.com) –> choose: publish immediately or save emails as drafts –> Save Settings. Make sure you take on of the complete email address you’ve just assigned for this account.

2.B Multiply: Login –> Settings –> Posting via E-Mail –> Enter Secret Pin (copy the complete email address ex: s3cr1temail@youraccount.multiply.com), set default access –> Save

2.C Vox: Member Sign In –> Account tab –> Mobile Settings –> note the email address provide for you

2.D * any other site which allows you to post via email (except Friendster which didn’t work) Chances are, you need just to check the Mobile Settings or Post by E-mail settings on your favorite blogging site to get that unique email address you’ll need for cross-posting.

Step 3.

With your list of email address from your other blogs: go to your Wordpress site and: Log-In –> Options tab –> Post Notification tab –> Manage Addresses –> following the instructions on the page, include all the email addresses of your other blogs the click Manage –> Settings –> customize the settings you’d like to have for cross-posting particularly the amount of time before the plug-in sends the emails and the sender email to those addresses you’ve included (or leave it alone) and press save.

Step 4.

Write a test post (or a real one) and press publish. Go back to Options tab –> Post Notification tab and you should see the title of your post queued for sending. Note the ‘next email will be sent’.

See some samples: on my Vox Ilimited posts), this post cross-posted my Multiply, on Blogger.

Notes:

1. With the Post-Notification plug-in, you can control the amount of information posted on the other blogs. For example, I only set my Vox account to publish posts from my Books and Comics categories. I also would rather have people go my main site to read the whole post so I truncated my cross-posts: anything below the ‘More’ tag on Wordpress doesn’t get published on the other sites.

2. You might need to edit the style of the email templates included in the Post-Notification plug-in.

3. I also have Twitter Tools and Postalicious plug-ins running. These generate ‘automatic’ posts (eg scheduled posts pulled from different websites). For some reason, despite having my settings on Post Notification as posts to publish, these automated posts are *NOT* queued for sending. I have to manually choose ‘yes’ on the post’s editing page under the ‘post notification’ bar, just below the post editing field. These would put the posts in queue for sending.

4. Despite the mobile post option on Friendster, it won’t accept the posts sent from the plug-in. I think they’re limiting e-mail size received on these. Funny because both Vox and Friendster are powered by the same blog publishing software (or at least from the same company). Maybe they’re limiting it from posts sent from phones.

5. Didn’t test cross-posting on these platforms: Movable Type, Wordpress.com, Livejournal etc. Drop me a line if you were successful cross posting at these blogging software and I’ll gladly update this.