Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Share your blog posts everywhere

By combining some simple and handy services, you can post short notifications of your blog posts on 1, 2 or over a dozen sites like FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more.

Wouldn't it be great every time you wrote a blog post to have it a link posted to it with a summary on all the sites you've joined? It's easy! It works like this:

Blog post > Connecting services > Post + link appears on your chosen sites.

Now, you could go to most of the sites you want the link to appear on and register your blog there. But Twitter and some others, for example, don't offer the feature of posting summaries of your blog posts for you.

Simple services to make it easy for you

Here are my favorite services for making this simple: TwitterFeed and Ping.fm. TwitterFeed will "read" and summarize your blog posts, then pass it to Ping to be sent to all the sites you want the summary of your blog posts to appear on.

So you'll need to create an account at TwitterFeed and Ping.fm, if you haven't already. Warning: TwitterFeed requires you to use an OpenID. Read this about OpenID, and then figure out if you already have an OpenID by reading this.

Information that you'll need:

  1. The feed address of your blog, to provide to TwitterFeed. If you have a WordPress blog, just add "/feed/" (without the quotes) after the ".com" in your blog address. If, for example, your blog is myblog.wordpress.com, your feed address is myblog.wordpress.com/feed/. For a blogger blog, you would usually just add "/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" (without the quotes) after the .com in your blog address. Try it! If it doesn't work, read this about rss URLs for blogger blogs.
  2. Login information for TwitterFeed and Ping.fm.
  3. Login information for whatever sites you want your blog posts to be sent to.
What to do:
  1. Log into Ping.fm and choose the site you want the link and summary of your blog posts to appear on.
  2. Log into TwitterFeed and click the "Create a new feed" link, then choose Ping.fm to send your posts to. It should look something like this.
  3. Click the link "Ping.fm Application Key" it will take you to Ping.fm to get the key you need to finish filling out the form. Copy it and paste it into the TwitterFeed form
  4. Click "get available methods" and choose "blog" from the drop-down menu that appears
  5. Finish by clicking the "Create" button on the TwitterFeed page.
Now TwitterFeed will read your blog and give it to Ping to post on whatever sites you setup in Ping to receive your posts!

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