Picture from here

RSS, I love RSS.   RSS makes crossposting easy.   It also allows me to read all of my news in Google Reader instead of jumping to 50 different sites that I used to visit once a day.  RSS allows users to subscribe to your site and read them where they want to, this may be good or bad based on your advertising style.  If you are like me and don’t really make a dime on your blog, then it doesn’t really matter.

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I use feedburner as a choke point for every web service that has an RSS feed (and I’m a member).   This allows me a couple things, the first is I can easily remember all the web services I sign up for.  The second thing is I have feeds that I can automatically plugin to lifestreaming services that don’t support the sites I use natively.

Through RSS I cross post my blog to Tumblr, Profilactic, Friendfeed, Suprglu, and any other life service I come across (just search for Creeva as the username).   Now At this point I’ve made feedburner to do all the heavy lifting and bandwidth intensive work for feed readers.  I even use my feed (a filtered version) to post notifications to Twitter when I have a new story published using the Twitterfeed service.

The other key thing to remember with RSS is when we get to the widget space.   Some sites don’t have an option for crossposting, they are completely locked.   You can however (in some cases) place a widget in your profile on these sites.  More times then not you can manage to place an RSS widget.  An RSS widget shows your current RSS feed items and allows you to place them on these profiles that otherwise have locked data.

With wordpress there is a plugin called feedwordpress that aggregates feeds and publishes them as items on your blog.   They keep trying to make this plugin better, but I can tell you it doesn’t seem ready for prime time yet.  I’ve tried every trick imaginable and I always end up receiving duplicate entries in my main blog.   Because of that I don’t use feedwordpress anymore, I may try in the future.  This would lead to the ultimate life caching solution, by allowing my blog to pull in all the data I generate everywhere else, and then crosspost it to all my friends across the web.  Unfortunately it’s a pipedream at this moment.

Now click the logo to subscribe to Creeva’s World 2.0:

Image from here

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover services that allow you to publish by e-mail.

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

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

/sigh

/fingers crossed

/hopes in the wind

For those that play the OMG why is this post in my database 300 times game, you know my pain.   The only thing I can say is it would be great if someone made a plugin with the same functionality as feedwordpress, until then I deal with my workarounds.

Wish me luck.

Personal writing:

• Holy Cross Posting Web Integration Life Caching Nirvana
• Gnome Conduit – Oh How I Hate to Love You
• coComment and Why It’s Important to Your Life Caching Needs
• Slashdot – Not Really Ready For Data Portability
• Bypassing Your Corporate Firewall Filtering or How to Torture The Firewall Admin
• Feedwordpress – De-Duplication Possible?
• Virtualizing Your Training Environment For Quick Restoration With VMware
• The GFQ5 Story About Creeva
• My Great Internet Data Clean-Up
• Why Can’t We Get Past Race and Gender

Links:

• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/08/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/09/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/10/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/12/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/13/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/14/08

Posts on other Web Services:

• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-09
• All Consuming: Creeva 02/10/08
• links for 2008-02-11
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-10
• coComments by Creeva
• All Consuming: Creeva 02/11/08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-11
• coComments by Creeva 02/12/08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-12
• coComments by Creeva 02/13/08
• Photos from Creeva 02/13/08
• links for 2008-02-14
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-13
• links for 2008-02-15
• coComments by Creeva 02/14/08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-14
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-15

There are a couple things I did learn from that encounter.

1.  Not everyone who visits your site cares about you minutia

2.  Your twitter follows don’t want to be notified everytime you add a new post on whatever RSS feed your interacting with

3.  Front pages of blogs get cluttered very quickly this way.

4. Don’t trust miracle plug-ins

So what have I done to fight life caching to be annoying for those that do not care?   I’ve filtered my RSS feed to only include topics that I’m having a first hand interaction with on this blog.   Everything except those categories is blocked from displaying on my front page.  You can still view them underneath the archives or in comments, but the front page remains cleaner.

Moving from a twitter notification plugin to an RSS servive that posts my feed notifcations to twitter lowers stress on my blog post (and stops all those unnecesarry categories from being alerted to over there.   For those that do happen subscribe to multiple feeds from me (hey they may actually exist) won’t have duplicates and duplicate notification.   Finally I don’t trust every wordpress plugin on the block.

Feedwordpress from the hours of pain has been on my poo-list for a while now.   It is taking quite a bit to show trust to this plugin again.   So far I’m testing it for a week on my test blog before it gets moved over to creeva.com.   I do hope it works.   I’ve just been burned in the past and don’t want to have to go through it again.