My friend asked me a few days ago about where I find the time “maintaining” all my social networking accounts and post to every single one of them (when she tried checking them out). She doesn’t realize that as far as “blogging” is concerned, there’s only one place I post from: my desktop – using Ecto.

What happens is that I draft the entry via Ecto, then post it to my main site ([www.nargalzius.com]()). Once it hits the site, I’ve got a bunch of WordPress plugins installed that handle cross-posting to other applicable social networks.

Having said that, it’s been a while since I checked out the possibility of expanding the cross-posting functionality of my blog. So I decided to check out if I could finally post to even more accounts in one go.

Consolidation is king

Ultimately all those “automatic posts” on my social networking accounts are just redirects to the entry on my main site. I’ve stated that the reason I do it this way is for my content to “age gracefully.” Social networks come and go, but your site (if you have one) will probably remain the same. That’s the basic principle I apply as far as my “web-presence” goes.

So like how Friendster used to be popular, then there was MySpace… then everyone in the Phlippines switched to Multiply, then now everyone’s on Facebook. Innovation will never end, there will always be new and hip networks that will replace the old and passe. One could imagine how an active “social internet user” would find it quite difficult to “establish” their “identity” in the web in such a volatile environment.

To me, it’s of no consequence, because I can have accounts on all those networks (old and new) and all I do is try to hook them somehow to my site’s engine. People who take the time to click through those automatic posts on the respective networks they “live in” will eventually land on the same main entry on my site. It’s quite an elegant approach if I may say so myself.

The current scene

So basically, the are really just two main sites I prefer to post “redirects” as of the moment: Facebook and Twitter. Since that’s where everyone is. Secondary would be Plurk and Multiply (specifically for Philippine users who are big on those particular networks for some strange reason)

I do have so many other accounts though, the social network icons below my profile (on my blog’s “home page”) is a list of different networks I’m a part of, and while it’s ideal to be able to hook them all to my site, some simply aren’t made to do so (e.g. gdgt, etc.), or at least not yet. And of course, the lack of plugins is a major mitigating factor.

I was able to readily post to Twitter and Plurk (and ultimately Facebook via Plurks intergration with FB). Multiply however wasn’t supported at that time. So instead I put this “Share This” button on the side panel of each post (along with the metadata) nor really so users can re-post it, but it really was for me to quickly generate a link to the entry for Multiply hahahaha. Multiply then had a feature to crosspost to LiveJournal.

Very convoluted but it worked and was pretty simple all things considered. I would basically post once on Ecto, then visit that entry on my site and use add to any to post to Multiply manually. So that’s two steps… but those same two steps can hit FIVE accounts without typing anything more.

New and Improved

Recently, I was able to find a plugin that leverages the email-posting features of sites that accept blog posting via email… which I then hacked to create a specific “string”

A new entry has been posted on nargalzius.com entitled

TITLE OF ENTRY

Click on the text/title above to read more.

Or something similar to it. And thanks to that plugin, I now should be able to post to all those five and a couple of more (Tumblr, Vox, Friendster ¹ Which I still have to figure out, etc) automatically!

That’s actually the purpose of this post… to test if it’s generating the proper links and if it’s posting properly on those other accounts hehehehe.

Ping.fm

So I’ve covered the blog entries… but there’s also the whole “status updates” which announces every little thing everyone’s doing nowadays (we’re all such attention whores aren’t we?) And those needn’t really be posted as “blog entries”

For this the only thing that really matters to me is Twitter and Facebook (at least as of this posting).

What I did was sign up for an account on Ping.fm then tied whatever accounts I could tie with them (they have a list of networks they could “interface” with. Thanks to Ping, I could post a single status updates across even more networks in one fell swoop.