BloggingAmigos

Having only recently started up my WordPress blog, one of my first concerns (beyond the normal woes of “What am I going to write about?” and “Why am I even keeping a blog?”) was how to make sure all the people in my other social networking circles were kept up to date with my newest blog. Having been on LiveJournal for the last seven years, I didn’t want to abandon all the contacts I had made there, but I didn’t want to go through all the work of duplicating every post from my WordPress blog over to LiveJournal. Similarly, I’ve been on Twitter since shortly after its inception, and wanted to make sure that my new blog posts were broadcast to my Twitter audience as well.

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LiveJournal, being my larger audience, was my first priority. After some Googling and searching on the WordPress Plugin Directory, I finally came across the plainly named LiveJournal Crossposter. As a rule, I am wary of any plugin or application that hasn’t been updated in over a year. Status such as that rarely indicates that the plugin is “perfect just the way it is” and more often means its “abandoned, because I just don’t care to work on it anymore.” Never the less, it was the only option I could find short of setting up a bulky RSS feed that I would then have to force my LiveJournal friends to subscribe to, so I downloaded it and started setting it up. LiveJournal Crossposter appears under the Settings menu and has a nice feature set with a user friendly interface. Connecting it to your LiveJournal account is as easy as simply putting in your username and password. No confusing codes or authentication links. Additionally, you can set the plugin to post to a community if that is your preference. You can customize a marquee of sorts (as a header or footer) that will refer your LiveJournal readers back to your WordPress blog. There are a series of custom options that the plugin will configure for you, or alternately, you can create your own full custom marquee using a series of context tags and so forth.

Other options you can set are default privacy settings; how comments are handled (readers can either comment on the LiveJournal cross post or be forced back to your WordPress); tag transferral, how extended text is handled (either with an LJ cut, a link back to WordPress, or simply ignoring it and posting the whole entry); and filtering by WordPress Categories. All of these settings are simply to configure the default options and can be changed on the Create New Post dialogue within the WordPress dashboard.

The plugin is extraordinarily efficient and throws the new blog entry up to LiveJournal almost as fast as your WordPress updates. Even when you edit a post after publishing it, the LiveJournal mirror is immediately resubmitted. It is in the editing of entries, however, that I found the only issue. When you edit an entry, it physically removes the post from LiveJournal and uploads a new version. This will lose any comments you may have already received at the LiveJournal end. This can be avoided, however, by simply forcing your LiveJournal friends to post all their comments on your actual WordPress blog. Easy peasy.

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A reliable Twitter publisher was actually more difficult to find. Not because it was hard to find a plugin, but because there were so many it was hard to find a good one. I ran through two other Twitter plugins that either did nothing, or made a rampant mess of my twitters, before discovering the final, successful plugin. While some of the earlier options had more configuration settings and lots of variables, they weren’t worth the effort and usually failed to work anyway. I actually gave up on it for a couple of weeks and just used TwitterFeed, portaling an RSS feed from my blog to Twitter. It worked, but it was slow. It scrapes every 30 minutes and when it pushes your post, can often reinterpret the title or cut off text. I still use it for LiveJournal and Flickr, but if I could get away from it completely, I would. Which, in the end, is why I was so excited to finally come across Twitpress. Twitpress loads under the Manage tab and is about as simple a plugin as you’ll ever see. You simply put in your Twitter username and password to initiate the service. You can also customize the message format with a few defined variables listed on the page for you. Really, it doesn’t have to do much; but what it does do, it does well. There are no filters, limited options, and basic configuration. Its a straightforward service and it works perfectly, and quickly!

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The final plugin that I wanted to briefly mention, is one that’s actually in use here on BloggingAmigos, but isn’t featured in any of the previous entries. When I was reading the latest greatest from Chalupa, I noticed the ShareThis link and icon at the bottom of the post and was curious. I’ve seen a lot of different mechanics for Digging, Stumbling, or Del.Icious.ing content on the internet, but I hadn’t had the pleasure of the ShareThis experience. Feel free to scroll to the bottom of this entry and click on it to see what I’m talking about. What I like about ShareThis is that its compact, because I’ll admit, I love collapsible spaces in web pages. It takes up very little room on a page, and yet expands out to be very functional. From one plugin, users can share your content with several other social bookmarking sites; and with minimal effort.The system is very customizable as well. Starting at the ShareThis home page, you first create an account which will inevitably provide some nice tracking stats for your click-throughs. Once your account is created, you simply build your button in the ShareThis for Publishers section. The WordPress section has the download link for the plugin and the button configuration options, which allow you to choose what all social linking is included on your pop-out window. You also have limited ability to change the menu colors to better match your WordPress layout.

All of this customization generates a code that is then reciprocally inserted into the plugin management page, which is loaded under the Settings menu on your WordPress dashboard. Also, default adding options are managed in the settings page as well.

Once everything is set up and running, you will want to go back to the ShareThis site and log in to your My Account page and register your domain. It takes about 24 hours for your domain to be validated, but once it is, you can visit a reports page that shows how the ShareThis button has been used on your blog. Some nice, additional, usage tracking for your blog.

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I hope you find some of these plugins useful and use them to try and drive a little extra traffic to your blog. So enjoy, and be sure to let me know how they work out for you!