Archive for: Automation

MySpace Crossposter plugin review for WordPress

Yesterday friend and fellow blogger Daniel Scocco posted the 16th part in a series about generating website traffic, Promoting your content on social networking sites.  Outside of Twitter, Daniel admits he doesn’t do much in the form of utilizing social networking or media sites to drive traffic to his site, but I have.  Leaving a comment in the article about my experience with MySpace specifically spawned a conversation of sorts in the comments of the article.

There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens.  The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins.  Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.

A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress.  It is almost totally what I was looking for.  As described on their site,

The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.

Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.

Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.

Perfect!  The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file.  Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server.  Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it.  I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are.  Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress.  The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.

Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password.  Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog.  Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.

Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content.  I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.

The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site.  While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source.  For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.

Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information.  The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.

Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing.  This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.

The End of Messaging Systems with Dial A Human

The net’s best kept secret is not so secret anymore.

Too often when we try to contact companies to ask questions and communicate with another human on the other end of the line, we end up hitting the damned evil messaging system. You all know this system, “Please listen to the following options and select the best choice…” Afterwards you’re given a dizzying number of options and numbers to press which leaves us as consumers frustrated and defeated.

This whole process reminds me of a lose-lose choose your own adventure book. At least with a real book there is a chance to actually succeed, with the messaging system you have more of a chance of punching a hole in the wall out of frustration then you do of actually succeeding.

Businesses tend to forget that putting on a human face is what we as consumers want to connect with. Since they’ve forgotten, Dial A Human has come in and offered us a chance to actually reach a real, working, paid employee of the company of our choice, according to their list.

If you’re tired of machines, check out the site and get connected to someone who can answer your questions!