Dan's Adventure

Regular readers of blogs will typically subscribe to either the RSS feed or by email, but many readers still prefer to only check the site periodically. Pushing content out to social networks is a good way of bringing new content to the attention of those who do not subscribe. Unfortunately most social networks don’t have a nice way of handling third party RSS feeds, they typically don’t integrate it well with content originating from the social network itself, which leads to work arounds being sought. The best solution that I have found is to use a combination of twitterfeed and ping.fm.

Twitterfeed will subscribe to an RSS feed and make posts to either twitter or ping.fm, that is its sole purpose and it does it well. The posts it make will have the URL shortened using URL shortener of your choice. Ping.fm takes a single post and ‘pings’ all the social networks that you have configured. I use it to post to twitter, facebook, myspace and bebo, saving me the effort of posting to each individually every time I post something new on Dan’s Adventure. When these social networks are ‘pinged’ the status on each of them is updated, with the post title and the URL, instantly making it visible to all of my contacts on each social network.

To get this solution working, I suggest the following steps:

1. Sign up to ping.fm
2. Configure ping.fm to post to all the social networks you are a member of
3. Sign up to twitterfeed
4. Setup a feed on twitterfeed to read your RSS feed and post it to ping.fm (in the advanced settings you can ad prefixes and suffixes which can be used to add ‘New Post:’ or hashtags)
5. Job done!