Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

Myspace.

Myspace.

OK, I’ve repeated it a cou­ple times I think I’m ready to actu­ally talk about it.  Unlike some other ser­vices where I explain the com­mu­nity and the func­tions, I’m going to refrain from doing that for Myspace.  While I do have a myspace account, I won’t say that I truly like Myspace.   I haven’t even both­ered to give myself the uber l33t cool pro­file page.   It’s a thing, not a good thing, not really a cool thing, just a thing.

So if I’m so “meh” towards Myspace why do I post there?  Because unfor­tu­nately some of my friends haven’t seen the light and still uti­lize the server.   I keep in touch with old gam­ing friends there espe­cially, so I feel I want to broad­cast my infor­ma­tion there as much as I do any­where else.   I’ll tell you what though, it isn’t easy.   Myspace may pro­claim new found open­ness, yet get­ting infor­ma­tion into Myspace with­out using their tools is a pain in the butt.

There are three things you can do remotely to update Myspace and keep your friends up to date on you.

• RSS Wid­get
• Sta­tus Updates
• Blog Posts

RSS Wid­gets:

For any site that allows you to place a wid­get into your pro­file, and does not allow you any remote options to any other func­tions, RSS wid­gets allow you to bypass the whole “you can’t put our data in our ser­vice unless you use our tools” wall.   While Myspace is get­ting bet­ter, it still wants you to play with it’s tools.

If you do a search for RSS wid­get “Ser­vice Name” in Google you shuold be able to pick and choose the one that is right for you.   By edit­ing your Myspace pro­file and putting your embed code into your pro­file, you should be able to dis­play the news feed you want right there on your pro­file page.

While this is all fine and dandy it doesn’t really cover what a cross­post­ing god wants to accom­plish, so let’s move onto some of the other options.

Sta­tus Updates:

Your sta­tus updates, the “I’m in my room cry­ing cause Kurt Cobain is still dead” sta­tus updates that you use on Myspace if your an aging emo kid, these can be done remotely.   By uti­liz­ing ser­vice such as Ping.fm and Hel­lotxt you can update this via instant mes­sen­ger or my choice, my Twit­ter account, with­out ever log­ging in.

You can do this by cre­at­ing an account on Hel­lotxt or Ping.fm and they will give you an email address in which you can notify them of your cur­rent sta­tus.   We’ve dis­cussed on ways to uti­lize e-mail noti­fi­ca­tions for use with other ser­vices, now you know the gate­way to updat­ing your Myspace sta­tus message.

Blog Posts:

Blog posts are the final achieve­ment of the cross­post­ing god when it comes to Myspace, unfor­tu­nately I only have a solu­tion for Word­press users.  There is a plu­gin called MySpace Cross­poster that will send your post over to your Myspace blog when it receives a pub­lish event noti­fi­ca­tion.  To get some of the infor­ma­tion in con­fig­ur­ing this plu­gin (it’s one of the most pain in the butt) you will have to open up your wp-config.php file to get the accu­rate information.

The options to pro­gram this plu­gin are as follows:

Data­base Settings:

These options will be auto­mat­i­cally con­fig­ured in future ver­sions of the plu­gin. Most of the data is avail­able in your wp-config.php file if you need to ref­er­ence it.

• DATABASE HOSTNAME: URL of your data­base host. NOTE: there is no “http://” before this server name
• DATABASE NAME: Name of your Word­Press database
• “POST” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_posts table has a dif­fer­ent name… Most users need not change this variable.
• “META” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_postmeta table has a dif­fer­ent name… Most users need not change this variable.
• DB USERNAME: User­name for the database
• DB PASSWORD:Pass­word for the database

Blog Infor­ma­tion:

These options will be auto­mat­i­cally con­fig­ured in future ver­sions of the plugin.

• BLOG URL:URL for your blog, com­plete with http://
• BLOG NAME: Name of your blog, as you’d like it to appear on your MySpace post.  Please note that it seems to have a prob­lem with non alphanu­meric char­ac­ters, using them can cause some strange results.  I had to con­fig­ure it to be “Creevas World” instead of “Creeva’s World 2.0″, your mileage may vary.

Myspace Login Credentials:

With­out these, you won’t be able to crosspost.

• MYSPACE USERNAME:Your MySpace user­name — usu­ally your email address.
• MYSPACE PASSWORD:Your MySpace password.

Post style:

Choose “noti­fi­ca­tion” or “full story”.

• POST STYLE: n = Noti­fi­ca­tion Style *rec­om­mended* (will drive traf­fic to your exter­nal blog) w = Whole Blog Entry (for­mat­ting may be lost in translation)

Because of longer posts like this one won’t show up in the myspace blog I just have it setup to post a noti­fi­ca­tion of a new blog post, this also allows me to see how often I get hits from my Myspace blog (not often I’ve either unloved or uninteresting).

If you have fur­ther ques­tions on mak­ing this all work together, please drop a com­ment below.  The next chap­ter in the cross­post­ing god series is going to be on RSS feeds and mak­ing them work for you in broad­cast­ing your infor­ma­tion across the blo­gos­phere in a con­trolled manner.

Pic­ture from here

Pre­vi­ous Entries in The Cross­post­ing God Series:

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 1 — The Introduction

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 2 — Vox

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 3 — Live Jour­nal and Deriv­a­tive Sites

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 4 — Entry, Dis­tri­b­u­tion, and End Points