Tag: wordpress

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There is a growing movement.  

The movement is towards a free web, unimpeded by the silos that threaten to own us, and liberated from social-networking norms that diminish our individuality.

And yet, there isn’t actually one movement; there’s two.  In fact, there are many more than two, but I’ll focus on just these for now.

 

Friendica

Friendica is a social networking platform which is decentralised, distributed and fully privacy-respecting.  It is, of course, open source too.  Friendica’s purpose is to be an ‘alternative to those “creepy” social networks that don’t really care about your privacy’.  It is primarily a web site with components that interact with other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) as well as other instances of Friendica.

Friendica requires self-hosting.

 

Indieweb

Conversely, the “Indieweb” is more of a concept than a specific implementation.  Its guiding principle is that “When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.”  Although similar ideologically to Friendica, the implementation is less defined.  Some people have implemented it via WordPress plugins, others through Jekyll and other static blogging systems.

Indieweb’s principles can even be implemented in “closed” systems, provided the data can always be accessed by its owner.

 

A 200 word post.

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Jetpack's homepage is your standard, modern affair.
Jetpack’s homepage is your standard, cloudy affair.

If you are a blogger, and you use WordPress, you will undoubtedly heard of Jetpack.  Jetpack for WordPress provides a ton of enhancements to any WordPress install.   Among the goodies is something for the socialite in all of us: the ability to automatically “broadcast” our blog posts to social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, via the Publicize feature.

All this free stuff of course comes with a “price” – having a user account on WordPress.com itself.   But, if you are a blogger – or at the very least you read other people’s blogs and contribute comments – this is not exactly a hardship.

Set-up and Testing

Setting up Jetpack is as easy as installing a WordPress plug-in.  If you are familiar with the process, you will probably have already seen Jetpack in the Add Plugin page.

The Publicize feature is equally easy to set up:  you simply click on the button corresponding to the social network you wish to link with, a page/pop-up opens to allow you to authenticate with that social network, and then you return to the Publicize page with a “Connected as…” confirmatory message.

Jetpack confirming account connections.
Jetpack confirming account connections.

The next step is to write a post and then publish it.  Simple, huh?  Well, not quite.

Content Formatting

Due to the different ways social networks publish posts, your “write once, publish many” WordPress post may need a little tweaking before it looks as good as possible.

Google+

Image of G+ post
Google+ rendered my blog post with lots of ! 😐

 

Facebook

 

Facebook produced a worthwhile post, with backlink.
Facebook produced a worthwhile post, with backlink.

Twitter

Twitter rendered my image sideways
Twitter did what it does best: stays brief

Links:

plus.google.com/+SteveDowe/posts/5eSkkPVLAfb

twitter.com/doweio/status/629950053499584512

Further Testing

Finding the most effective way to post requires more testing.  My main aim was to find a way in which one post can look great on the three main social platforms (Google+, Twitter and Facebook – not that I care too much about the latter).

[ This is a legacy-published post, originally written but unpublished on 13 August 2015.  Some details may not longer apply to recent software releases. ]

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I have two blogs hosted by Google/Blogger (a blog for work, life and general stuff that interests me) and WordPress (a blog just for work).  I differentiate these on the basis of content type as opposed to areas of interest.  That is, purely commercial (or tech-commercial) stuff goes to the WordPress one.

And yet, I wonder, what is the point?  With the ability to group, tag, label and so on, I can collect similar articles together in a variety of ways.  Anyone with half a brain, left or right, would be able to see that any articles I have labelled “business” are probably more commercially-oriented that ones labelled “may contain nuts”.

The problem is, I don’t want to miss the party – anywhere.  WordPress blogs seem, by some opinion, so popular that it makes me wonder if WordPress is more of a writer’s platform than blogger, and that blogger is something more akin to myspace for the blogosphere – a kind of scrawly, messy, throw-together-but-informative kind of creative jumble.  Perhaps I’m being harsh of others’ blogger blogs, even if I’m being slightly too kind to my own… 😉

Conversely, the opinions cited in various threads (1, 2, 3) would suggest that Blogger is the way to go, at least for feedback options and template customisability. 

Regardless, I am not entirely convinced that either system is, actually, tremendously brilliant. Maybe I’d be a better person to judge once I’ve committed a thousand or two- more articles to cyberspace and then regret/celebrate making the wrong/right choice.

Then everyone would really thank me for my opinion.  Then disregard it.  😉