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In part 8 I was going to write about crossposting to blogger, but that’s been delayed for the time being.  I’ll get back to that subject as soon as I get a chance.   Let’s move onto monitoring your crossposting.

Some people may have noticed that on my lifestream there seem to be duplicate posts.   This is because I’ve been working on adding all the RSS feeds from all the services in one trackable lifestream.   The benefits are that you can see and track how long information takes to get from one site to the next.   This also allows you to see where your crossposting is failing.   For example I’m noticing that my posts going to pownce are not getting through so when I get a chance I’ll look into what is actually causing that.

Lifestreaming all of our sites into one endpoint site that you can control and maintain allows all the little maintance to happy at a single glance.   We all know that crossposting is usually best effort delivery.  Not everything shows up in all the sites, but that happens because your not actively maintaining those sites and sometimes things just go wrong.

By having a single stream of all of your sites you are not bogged looking at RSS items for every site all together.  If I put all my feed items in google reader then it would take me an hour each day to get through all of them.  Having a quick glance allows the information to be singled out in a daily quick view.

Currently I’m using the wordpress lifestream plugin to handle my lifestream page.  It gives me the benefit of having a daily summary post generated automatically.  This allows me to have a permanent archive of all of my daily archives that I can go back search and vault away in my own life vaulting fashion.

Life is good.  Maintaining and monitoring in a single glance – that’s great.

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

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

The Crossposting God Series Part 7 – Where Can You Post By E-Mail?

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Where can you post by E-mail?  Well this is the easiest of crossposting methods (especially if you use Blogger).  There are lots of plugins for wordpress or movable type that can send out your full post as an e-mail to another address.   In most cases you would send this to your own e-mail address so you had it for reference.  What about sending it to another site entirely?  What if that site could send it to another site?  You can see how this chain can work.   If you are using Blogger then you can send out your post to ten e-mail addresses.   This means that your post can replicate like bunnies.   What are some of the sites that can receive e-mail posts?  Let’s get into that.

The original Creeva’s World was hosted on Blogger at creeva.blogspot.com.  This is where I started writing and I didn’t want to abandon it after migrating over to wordpress.  This was the very first site I crossposted to from my wordpress blog.  Crossposting allowed me to not abandon my site and any readers that may go to that address, but I could enhance my own experience while keeping theirs the same.

Lifelogger is the “cooler” blogging service, at least that’s what they say.   I’m not going to use any blogging platform again that I can’t customize to the fullest extent.  WordPress has spoiled me.   Though I do maintain a site there.

Unlike some major social networks (I’m looking at you Facebook and Myspace), Friendster does support e-mailing in your blog messages.

Blogr is just another blogging host that accepts e-mail.  Very blogger like, but crossposting friendly.

Evernote is unique unlock some of the rest of these sites, Evernote is a notebook service.   It allows you to e-mail in snippets (or use the desktop applications) to send in information that you can then share with your friends.  You can e-mail in text notes, audio, or video.

Busy Thumbs is a simple moblog site that accepts posts via e-mail.

Twine is similar to Evernote, but it’s about collections and community.   Think of it as sharing what you have with your friends.

Google Groups is a spot that I used to use as an online backup for my blog.   I have a private google group that only handles my own blog posts.   No you can’t join, not like you would want to.

I’ve just recently start crossposting to an old Yahoo Group that I used to moderate.   Mostly this is because I can share my thoughts with my friends that are still in that group, but that group is essentially dead.   So this is the only thing that it’s around for to keep me from pulling the complete axe on it.

Each Day is designed to handle your memories and save them so you can go back over your life.  It handles multiple media formats but all I’m concerned about is the e-mail option.

Multiply is a social network in the same vein as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook.

Over at Vox I maintain a page to integrate with their community.  I’ve posted in the past how vox is a unique community and because of that I receive unique feedback.   They refer to their e-mail inbound service as moblogging.

I like to think of all of my blog posts as separate documents.   After working on this for awhile, I decided to start e-mailing all of my entries to my google docs account let’s me to search and repurpose documents a little easier then searching through the blog.   It’s my dump all account for documents.  I am annoyed that I can’t e-mail blog posts to Zoho Writer for redundancy, they only take documents as attachments.

When you are looking for a new site to crosspost to check and see if they have an option where you can post by e-mail.  Some sites may refer to this as moblogging.  Also remember to e-mail your post to yourself so you have a backup you can control.

Oh, I use the DJ E-Mail Publish plugin to push out posts from WordPress.

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover Blogger more in depth.

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

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

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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:

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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

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You would think that 48 hours away from the Interwebs would be easy.   That catching up would be no big deal.  Well not really.

Upon finally bringing myself to login, it wasn’t as bad as I thought but took a few hours to catch up. 858 unread feeds to wade through – this took two sessions.  Emails – 84 unread email threads – with about 150 unread emails – these are all ones that have made it through my filters and some I could immediately dismiss, but then again I’ll have a load of work email to tear through on Monday.

My blog had unread comments that I needed to reply to, I had to go through and check stats, myspace messages to reply to, livejournal and vox comments to read.  After 4-5 hours I’m now just caught up with all of my day to day Internet activities.

BLAH.

I still have almost 30 draft posts I need to wade through.

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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.

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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

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When we think about crossposting, it actually is more in depth then most people think.  From a very simple level you go from one site to another.   At a higher level though you are publishing from a single source to tens if not hundreds of places.   Used correctly crossposting is a very publishing tool that lets you gain readers very cheaply (or free), as long as you are willing to login to all of these other sites to maintain readers and communities.   If you are not willing to login to all these remote services and address comments, suggestions, and criticisms; then crossposting is not for you.

There are three different functions in a crossposting architecture.   These functions include your entry points, distribution points, and end points.   You could also add filtering points but utilizing services like yahoo pipes, but for the moment that is out of scope of this discussion (for the moment).   Each of these steps is important and you need to make sure you don’t get them screwed up or you can be in for one heck of a data cleanup time.

Data entry points are areas in which you interact, create, and start your data.   In my example if I wanted to put up an audio or video post to my blog I would use Utterz.   With Utterz I can be on the road and pick up my phone, record a post, and it automatically gets posted and disseminated throughout my network.  If I have a picture I want to share I normally upload it to Flickr and the chain starts all over again at that scale.   Via  SMS I can insert a quick status update to twitter and alert everyone following me and change my status across many network (I also do this via IM).   For longer written posts I normally start at my own main blog.   It just feels write to actually write this and start with my blog (though other blogs I may write an article on will eventually make it back here).

Distribution points (which in some cases double as end-points in my design) are sites or services that pull in data (or has data pushed into it) and at that point sends the data off to another service.   In my architecture sites that can resend data out via e-mail (such as blogger) become major distribution points for me.   You have the ability to resend out up to 10 e-mails to other services from blogger.  Another major distribution service for me is feedburner, this allows me to shape and filter me RSS feed and push this data out to other services either via widgets or into services that can import in RSS feed data directly.

End points are the sites or feeds in which your readers are actually interacting with you at.  It’s where they are reading and processing your information.  It’s where comments are given and it’s where your data actually has meaning has come to rest.  Some end-points may seem useless in your overall architecture (and yes when you become a crossposting god it is architecture), but how much is the one or two readers worth that may discover you through that service?  Normally it takes only a couple minutes to setup a profile on a new service and set your data in place once it starts from it’s entry point.  If you can’t automate this you need to decide if it’s worth the time to copy and paste the data across.  To me, if I have paste data into an end-point manually, then it’s not worth it to me.   Everything has to be done automatically.

In the beginning of this article I mentioned that you need to make sure you don’t confuse a role in your architecture.   The reason you need to be aware is that you have a chance of regurgitating the same data over and over again across all of your end points.  When this happens the clean up is horrendous and can take anywhere from hours to weeks.   The amount of effort you put in is relative to how much you care about that extra data hanging out on your end points.   The more popular and feedback you get from an end point the more care, feeding, and presentation care you should put into it.

In the crossposting god series part 5 we’ll be covering myspace.

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

Live journal is another online blog that focuses on community.   While it is not as active and communal as Vox, it is infinitely more focused on true interaction between users compared to Myspace, Facebook, or any other of the more traditional collect as many friends as you can pokemon style social network.   I can say that in rankings of comments and feedback I get back from readers that my live journal is only to third to my vox and my main blog in terms of interaction.  Live journal has been so successful that there are derivative sites that use the live journal engine, the steps listed below should allow you (with some tweaking) to post to any of those sites as well.

I really wish I could say that I had options for you to crosspost to live journal from Vox or Blogger, but currently unless you have a paid account you won’t be able to use the post by e-mail method I mentioned in the Vox article.  If you do however wish to use a method and have a paid live journal subscription the steps are similar to the steps in the vox article.

Since my main blog is wordpress I of course us a plugin to facilitate the crossposting – LiveJournal Crossposter to be exact.   When wordpress 2.5 was released there was some issues with this plugin, but it’s since been updated and corrected.   To configure this plugin you do the following steps.

1. Download and install the plugin

2. Activate the plugin in your wordpress installation on your plugin tab

3. Go to your settings tab and click on the live journal option

4.  Fill in the following options:

• LiveJournal-compliant host:  (If you are using a LiveJournal-compliant site other than LiveJournal (like DeadJournal), enter the domain name here. LiveJournal users can use the default value)
• LJ Username
• LJ Password
• Community: (If you wish your posts to be copied to a community, enter the community name here. Leaving this space blank will copy the posts to the specified user’s journal instead)

That gives you the most basic configuration of this plugin, however unlike many other wordpress plugins that would end there, livejournal crossposter gives you a myriad of more options.  Here are a few more things you can tweak:

• Crosspost header/footer location – choices at the top or bottom of the post
• Set blog name for crosspost header/footer – you can use your own blog’s title or a customer title
• Custom crosspost header/footer – gives you the option for custom coding in the header or footer
• Privacy level for all posts to LiveJournal – choices are public, private, or friends
• Should comments be allowed on LiveJournal? – You can force commentors to come back to your blog to comment or allow them to comment directly in live journal (I just let them go directly onto live journal’s site)
• Tag entries on LiveJournal? – Choices are -Tag LiveJournal entries with WordPress categories only, Tag LiveJournal entries with WordPress categories and tag, Tag LiveJournal entries with WordPress tags only, and Do not tag LiveJournal entries.
• How should LJXP handle More tags? Choices are - Link back to WordPress, Use an lj-cut, and Copy the entire entry to LiveJournal.
• Select Categories to Crosspost – You have the option to choose which categories of posts you wish to send over to live journal.  This allows you to target which posts and topics you wish to share, a big boon for some online publishers who are capable of writing on topic.

I think livejournal crosspost should be a benchmark plugin for all other crossposting plugins to come.   You can crosspost to live journal from other services, such as Utterz or Ping.fm – and I’ll be covering the Live Journal crossposting functions from those sites when I get to those articles.

The next article in the series will cover the difference between crossposting endpoints and crossposting distribution points.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

Vox is a blog community that really focuses on the community aspect.   When Xie first started blogging on vox I kind of poo pooed it.   However I didn’t find some people that I knew from SWG that posted there, ever since I can tell you it is definetly a close knit community.   Since I’m a crossposter I’m kind of on the outside, but I reply to comments and Oh My Yod! is a blog I visit every other day.

Vox is one of the easier services to crosspost to since it allows post by e-mail.  To enable posting by e-mail go through the follow steps:

1. Go to your account settings

2. Go to mobile settings – here you can get your moblog address (which you can post to from any e-mail address) and the settings you wish to apply to it.

3. Setup your account that you are crossposting from (which can be any service that sends out emails)

There are two services I can recommend that you can use to post to Vox with (or bridge across with more on that around part 18), these are Blogger or a custom wordpress installation.

For Blogger:

1.  Go into your blog’s settings

2.  Go to your emai tab

3.  Paste your Vox moblog email address

4.  Now any post that goes to your Blogger account (I’ll talk about crossposting to blogger in a later thread)

For WordPress

1. Download a plugin that allows for publishing via e-mai ( I use DJ EmailPublish)

2. Go to your settings page and configure the plugin pasting in the Vox moblog address

3. Save and apply settings

4. Now any post that goes up on your wordpress account crossposts over to your vox account.

In part 3 I will be covering crossposting to live journal, so I hope to see you then.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

We all go through it, a new web service launches and we think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.   We add a few friends convinving them to leave their current platform and migrate over to your new find.   Time goes by and a few months later you are realizing that your not really using that web service.   You don’t want to abandon your friends, you also don’t want to login to give them updates.  This is the dilema that many users online are facing daily.   Unfortuantely I can’t give you a complete answer, but I can explain to you what I do.

One thing I utilize in my social networks is crossposting.   Utilizing wordpress plugins and general trickery I manage to crosspost to my most used social networks where I may or may not have any friends, but I’m there so my friends can choose which social network they wish to follow me on instead of what I am using.   Unfortunately what I’ve learned is that I’m happy to update myself on social networks, but most people I know update slowly and don’t produce much content for me to read, so I more or less catch up on all of them via Spokeo.   Cross posting allows me though to update them without me having to manually go update myself on those other networks.   For all intents and purposes from my point of view if I don’t login and interact with that service anymore it’s abandoned.   The services I do cross post to are vox, myspace, xanga, live spaces, live journal (which crosspost to dandelife for me), blogger, and multiply.

This however only allows a fraction of the services I used in the past that share my content and link back to my main blog.   For other services I utilize RSS feed widgets or even automatic updates that occur via the RSS feed.   The services I use to crosspost my RSS feed items are tumblr, twitter, jaiku, facebook, suprglu, friendfeed, and lijit.   This allows all my updates to occur over to those sites.

I only interact with a handful of services, luckily services I do like flickr, youtube, facebook, and livejournal all import their comments back to my blog.   All web services I use that allow for an RSS feed I import via email subscriptions through feedburner.   This allows me to life cache.

If you have a service that you don’t use any more discover someway to import your updated content into it.   A little bit of effort that is automatic in the future goes a long way to maintaining those friendships you have on your social networks.   It also stops your friends from getting upset with you for abandoning them (they’ll never know the difference).

Myspace

Blogger

Vox

Live Journal

So lastly we’re testing out MSN Spaces – then my crossposting tests should be done for a bit