Online Presence
With the address of my web site about to be published in "about the creators" paragraphs in a couple of anthologies, I figured it was high time for me to overhaul the site into something sort of professional looking, and I did that with WordPress. There are static pages with info and/or links for stuff I've done, and a blog section on the main page where I can just post stuff, keeping it current but with more permanence than FB updates that no one will see again after a few hours. In the process, I'm trying to turn that site into a hub for my online presence.
Aside from participating in a handful of forums (including this one) Facebook has been my main presence, so I'm trying to integrate my site with that. In particular, I want a status update posted there every time I post something on my blog. Which is easier said than done. I've found a few ways to do it (in theory):
What are y'all doing?
Aside from participating in a handful of forums (including this one) Facebook has been my main presence, so I'm trying to integrate my site with that. In particular, I want a status update posted there every time I post something on my blog. Which is easier said than done. I've found a few ways to do it (in theory):
- Facebook has an official plug-in for WordPress that adds FB features to your site. For example, you can include a comments section that uses FB's system, links on pages/posts for people to Like them, and so on. It will also do what I was talking about: status updates for each new item you post. In theory. In practice, I can't seem to get it to work. At its best I got it to post status updates to FB that no one but me could see. And getting it to work at all requires wading into Facebook's app-development tools, which are maddening. If I weren't familiar as a user with the clusterfuck that is Facebook's own "process" for developing their site, I'd find this astonishing. Instead it's a head-shaking "figures".
- There's a third-party plug-in that doesn't have the deep and wide integration of the official FB plug-in, but is supposed to do the same thing with status updates, called "Add Link to Facebook". I haven't been able to get it to work, but that may just be my fault, or the fault of my slow web site. It also requires some mucking about with creating a FB app, but apparently not as much as the trainwreck that is the official FB plug-in.
- A more versatile solution is the web site IFTTT.com. That's short for "IF This Then That". It's a point-and-click system that allows you to select from a wide range of web sites and services, and link them using pre-built actions and "recipes" such as "If [a new post on WordPress] then [post update on Facebook]". Or you can have it tweet something to Twitter, or a whole bunch of other things. And it works. Based on the recipes you have active, it scans for the conditions in your recipes every 15 minutes, which is a perfectly acceptable delay for this sort of thing. The thing that bugs me about this option is that it depends on a third web site to make it happen, and (a corollary of that) you have to give them your login credentials for every site involved in your recipes.
What are y'all doing?
Comments
meh...
Jetpack plug-in. It's an official (and free) plugin available directly from the Wordpress site.
Artists can get away with a more... bohemian image than bankers and engineers can. Coarse or vulgar language is always best suited to using with ones peers/cohort, and is best left behind outside of that. Most of us are more cautious bout that sort of thing with older and younger relatives, for instance. So it becomes a matter of who your twitter audience is.
DeviantArt, I have different issues with, which explains my lack of presence there.
G+ has been recently forced upon me, seemingly as a precondition of continuing to use Picasa at all.
Most comfortable in the Livejournal venue, and I'm in a bit of a conflicted mind about Facebook despite having a wider reach there than on LJ.
When you google my name, unless there's an election in Canada, and fill the first 2-3 pages of search results. But, I've also been doing the webcomic thing for almost 11 years....
On it.
My new home for blogging:
https://dewline.dreamwidth.org/