Syndicating A Blog Post

I wanted to syndicate my content and notify my social sites automatically. The studio’s too busy to build me something so I played about with a few free sites to see if I get get some useful syndication between Google Docs and my network, including my blog…. there may be smarter ways of doing it but for the purposes of testing this will need to suffice.

I wanted to publish my articles once which notified all my social networks something like:

  • Google Docs, Wordpress, Feedburner, Twitter, Google Buzz, TwitterFeed, Ping.Fm, Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr, Posterous, Friendfeed, Delicious & any other networks i use

Google Docs to Wordpress

I wanted to write my articles in Google Docs so i could start spell checking, but then publish to my self hosted Wordpress blog at Hobo, direct from Google Docs;

  1. Go To Google Docs
  2. Create Your Article
  3. Close it and go back to main Google Doc screen
  4. Select the article I want to publish to Wordpress
  5. Select MORE ACTIONS > PUBLISH
  6. You get a chance to configure your blog settings here and you’re ready to publish your Google Doc directly to Wordpress
  7. UPDATE – API – I am using the MetaWeblog API as I was having a problem with article titles not appearing in my WP post
  8. REMEMBER – you can use Google docs to edit the actual HTML of the page (for instance if you want to add hidden elements in your article html like a page break) although beware – Google Docs seems to have some issues with certain formatting elements it seems…. so check the end result….

Wordpress To Google Buzz
I’m considering using Google Buzz as my primary social network (tho I use Twitter at the mo) so I obviously want my Wordpress blog to post the article automatically to my Google Buzz account – see here – http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/documentation/#connect and here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=14991d6d4220449 1&hl=en and http://www.google.com/buzz/bradfitz/PPjHXDhANAC/Want-to-connect-your-b log-or-some-other-feed-to how to do that but basically all you need to do is add a

<link rel=“me” type=“text/html” href=“http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username”/>

and then your article appears on my Google Buzz account (hopefully)

My blog rss feed is syndicated through Feedburner which has the option to automatically Tweet a feed post, so I could choose this option to notify Twitter, but as (I think) Socialize service only supports Twitter and no other, I’ll leave this option out to avoid duplicate tweets. UPDATE: Actually, no for some reason Ping.fm is not playing nice with Twitter, so I WILL use FEEDBURNER TO NOTIFY TWITTER…

RSS Feed To TwitterFeed to Ping.fm

I took my Feedburner RSS feed URI and signed up with Twitter Feed

… which lets me push my article automatically to Ping.fm

… which of course will let me syndicate my article to a lot of other services i might want to add to control later  – I’ll use Ping.fm to POST TO TWITTER (for a test I will also post to the Hobo Tumblr blog – I had to make sure my Tumblr blog wasn’t cross posting to Twitter in my Tumblr settings – and Posterous but that’s all)

Ping.fm to Twitter & Other Services

and

and the *new* Hobo delicious account where I bookmark my blog posts for my network as well as other sites i find of interest

Syndicating My Tweets

So that’s when I blog sorted out. And at some point along the chain (VIA Ping.fm Feedburner) what I posted finds it’s way to Twitter.

As at the moment Twitter is the main channel I use, I want my Tweet to sync with social media sites too, but I don’t want to create a lot of duplicate noise or create any type of spammy syndicated content loop.

As I don’t want to create pointless noise, I’ll let my Twitter account (updated either by myself when I tweet or via Ping.fm ‘FEEDBURNER / PUBLICIZE / SOCIALIZE’ when I blog) notify various other services

will update the new Hobo Facebook page

using RSS Graffiti,

and any links I publish in Twitter should be synchronised with Delicious using http://packrati.us/ and I can continue to use Twitter as a bookmarking service

i’ve already connected my Linkedin account with Twitter at Linkedin for my connections

and I have done the same with my Friendfeed account.

This post is actually a test post I wrote in Google Docs to see if it posts correctly to WP and works as expected with the social media sites I browse. There’s other ways of setting this chain up but this one suits my intentions. I don’t expect to use Twitter any more than I do already which is not much at all…so noise hopefully isn’t a problem.

As this is a test post, some things might not work as expected, and I will update the post with probs/fixes and other syndication possibilities…

We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....