Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Update Distribution Scheme

Often I want to write a blog or status update at one place and want to distribute this update at various sites. This can range from very simple to elaborate schemes. I earlier used friendfeed for this purpose but now they are no longer reliable after acquisition. Usually it is a good idea to update the same post to multiple blogs so that if one is not available, other source is able to take over. Or even just to maintain backups. Also, each blog location has its own community tied to it. Similar thing is true for twitter and facebook page. These are dominant update sharing networks and they have different purpose.

 

Simple Scheme

Requirement: I want to blog at a single location and update my other blogs, on wordpress.com, tumblr.com and blogger automatically. Also, I want to status update on twitter and my facebook page with the title of the post.

Solution: Use http://Posterous.com ! Write the blog at posterous, one single place, or send update via email! Setup autopost on posterous for my other blogs: wordpress and blogger. Also, for my tumble blogging site on tumblr and of course twitter and facebook page. Once my post is updated on posterous, I can see the content automatically posted everywhere. I do this because I do not have to worry about SEO and branding and stuff like that. It is all personal. This is just an example, posterous supports many other networks like linkedin, google buzz etc. So, it is as below:

Posterous  ------> Blogs                       --------> Wordpress.com

                                                         --------> blogger.com

                          Tumble blogs            ---------> tumblr.com

                          Status Updates        ----------> twitter.com

                                                        ----------> facebook.com

SEO Friendly Scheme

Requirement: Someone loves their privately hosted wordpress for its flexibility and SEO capabilities. They do not want to make posterous as their primary blog. Then how to distribute?

Solution: Use http://ping.fm ! Update your private blog at any site. Feed the RSS of your main blog to ping.fm. Add your target networks to ping.fm for update. Ping.fm can update more than 30 networks and is equally good in that regard. Best part: all the links to post go to your main blog.

Main Blog          ------>           Ping.fm       -------->            Blogs                       --------> Wordpress.com

                                                                                                                   --------> blogger.com

                                                                                                                   --------> posterous.com

                                                                                    Tumble blogs            ---------> tumblr.com

                                                                                    Status Updates        ----------> twitter.com

                                                                                                                  ----------> facebook.com

 

 

Complex Scheme

Requirement: For my college alumni community, I needed something more complex. There are two set of information: blogs/status updates and discussions/mailing lists. They have to be consolidated seperately. All discussions in forums or yahoogroups have to be consolidated to be consolidated in one google group. Also there are several blogs.

Solution: Firstly, I have setup all forums/discussions to come to my gmail inbox. I have applied a filter there to forward those emails to my googlegroup.com com emails.

Then, all the blog RSS are mixed using rssmix.com (or similar feed combining service) to one single RSS feed. This is needed because ping.fm supports only one RSS as input. This input is fed to ping.fm and to several output netwrks from there.

Finally, I as admin update only on posterous and posterous distributes it to all necessary sites.

Forums          ------>           Gmail       -------->            Google group

 

All Blogs        ------>           RSSmix.com       -------->            Blogs                  --------> posterous.com

                                                                                    Status Updates        ----------> twitter.com

                                                                                                                  ----------> facebook.com

Admin Posterous  ------> Blogs             --------> Wordpress.com

                                                         --------> blogger.com

                          Tumble blogs            ---------> tumblr.com

                          Status Updates        ----------> twitter.com

                                                        ----------> facebook.com

 

Monday, November 8, 2010

Untitled

Sent from my iPod