Category: Tips (Page 2 of 6)

I used to write a blog post, then go to TinyURL.com to get a short link, then I’d log in to Twitter to tweet about my new blog entry, then I’d go to Facebook and do the same thing. What a drag. Here’s how to automate your blog so you write once and publish to multiple place automatically — it mirrors the content out to both Twitter and Facebook with no extra work necessary!

This mini-tutorial assumes:

1. You have a Facebook “page” set up and a Twitter account.
2. You have a blog set up on your own domain (mine is swshinn.com) and it uses WordPress software to manage the site.
3. You (or someone you know) knows how to FTP into your site and install WordPress plugins (it’s really not that hard — Google search to find many tutorials on this).

Step 1: Getting WordPress to automatically post to Twitter

Download and install the “YOURLS: WordPress To Twitter”  plugin:

http://planetozh.com/blog/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter-a-short-url-plugin/

Once installed and activated, configure these settings:

1. Under “URL Shortener Service” pick a service. I use TinyURL.
2. Under “Twitter Settings” enter the login and password for your Twitter account.
3. Finally, check the box that says ”  Send a tweet with the short URL”. This means that every time you submit a blog post, this WordPress plugin will automatically make a short URL for your blog post (in my case, generating a TinyURL) and post the entry to your Twitter account.

Here’s a screenshot of my settings (click the image to enlarge it):

YOURLS WordPress To Twitter Plugin

Step 2: Getting Facebook to automatically list your new blog posts

Assuming you have a Facebook “page” (I’m not sure it would work with a normal Facebook account or Facebook “group”; and most authors prefer the “page” features), here’s how you do it.

1. Click on the link to “Edit” your page.
2. Then on the settings page that appears, under “Notes Settings” on the right, it gives the option to “Import a blog.” Click that link, and then enter the URL for your WordPress blog’s RSS feed (by default, this is “http://yoursite.com/feed”).
3. Click on “Start Importing.”

You’re done!

In the future, when you post to your WordPress blog, WordPress will tweet your post to your Twitter account, and Facebook will grab the entry and post it under your Facebook page notes. Note that Facebook may take a few minutes (maybe even an hour or more) to grab your blog post, so be patient. 😉

If you liked this article, add me as a “friend” on Facebook and Twitter!:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/S-W-Shinn/197734288134

http://twitter.com/swshinn

A great quote from Stephenson’s “Why I am a Bad Correspondent” — why writing is hard work requiring long, uninterrupted spans of time:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

If you’re like me, you find yourself working on multiple computers, and lugging a USB stick around can be a pain (what if you forget it?). Moreover, what if you lose your ISB stick?

Answer: use Box.net to store your writing documents and have them accessible from any PC or Mac.

This article shows how to connect to Box.net via the Mac Finder, giving you desktop access to a free, mountable 1 Gig online storage account. In a nutshell:

1) Get a box.net account.
2) In the Mac Finder select the GO menu then choose Connect to Server (Or Command-K).
3) Put in the address: https://www.box.net/dav
4) When it prompts, put in your Box.net username as your name and your Box.net password in the password field.

That’s it, look on your desktop. There should be a new connection mounded on your hard drive called dav.

Here’s an article for connecting to Box.net under Windows XP.

The secret is a web protocol called WebDav, which both XP and Mac support, and Box.net now provides as one of their many ways to access your Box.net file storage.