Nonsense

It’s occurred to me that I’m pummeling my poor friends on Facebook with an absolutely ridiculous number of duplicate posts. I’m blaming Posterous, all while using Posterous to post this very post.

If you’re not aware of Posterous, the idea is pretty simple: Send an email to post@posterous.com and you post an entry on your blog there. The fine elves running around behind the scenes take a quick look at your content and do their best to make it all pretty for display. Linked to a YouTube video? Consider that video embedded. Attached a few photos? You’ve got a lovely little photo gallery. On top of all this, Posterous lets all your other sites know what you’ve just done: Twitter and Facebook get status updates, Flickr and YouTube get photos and videos, while Tumblr and your personal blog get the whole shebang.

This is where I got into trouble.

Tumblr is already autoposting to Facebook. So is Twitter, and for that matter, Flickr and YouTube. Basically, when I send something to Posterous, Facebook gets told about it at least four, maybe more, times over.

I’m sorry about that.

The challenge, then, was to figure out how best to not hit Facebook over and over again, while still putting my content out there and into its appropriate places, all while using the convenience of simply emailing Posterous. As a secondary challenge, I figured that since I was going to propagate my posts all over the place, I may as well direct traffic towards my own personal site instead of my posterous.

What I did was set Posterous not to update Twitter or Facebook. After all, my Twitter updates my status on Facebook as it is, so I only need to send the update once. Since I want to drive traffic to my site, I need the link from Twitter to direct to eurotransient.com. Posterous doesn’t let you do this, but a number of Wordpress plugins will notify Twitter of new content. I settled on Twitter Tools, which has a host of other features, but for now I’m only interested in the fact that it’ll tweet out my new posts.

I’m still sending Posterous to my Tumblr, but I’m not sending those updates to Facebook. Frankly, I’m liking Posterous a lot more than Tumblr, so this is more just for the curiosity of keeping a Tumblr account around to play with.

Pictures and video are still going to be a bit of a challenge. I do want my pictures sent to Flickr, but I’m also not going to exclusively send all photos to Flickr through Posterous. That means I still need Facebook to pull my Flickr photos. For the time being, you’re still going to get some duplicates on photo posts, but I may change this at some point. Ditto on videos.

I think I’m all set up now, so like the subject says, this is just a test to see how it works. If you do find yourself over here, however, I’d love to hear how those of you with accounts on dozens of different sites manage to keep everything running nice and smooth.

UPDATE: It didn’t work. Twitter Tools failed to pass on the bit.ly shortened url, which kind of defeats the purpose of this thing in the first place. So yeah. To be continued…

UPDATE #2: Found the problem! When I pasted my bit.ly API key into Twitter Tools so I could capture all my links on my bit.ly account, I accidentally pasted in an extra space at the end of the key. This threw everything out of whack! Thankfully, everything should be back in whack.