Phee-roo!

I’ve recently tried to consolidate my life online. Limit the number of networks I belong to to a bare minimum and then limit my interaction with them as much as possible. I wanted to host everything I possibly could on my site, and then reference as much as I can back to my site.

The only thing I update now is my site which runs Wordpress and my Twitter. I actively belong to :

• LiveJournal
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter

My site is the main hub, it has all my updates, pictures… pretty much everything about it me. It’s all you really need to access me. But most people don’t want another page to check daily so I felt it was worthwhile to integrate into popular services. Currently the flow looks something like this:

The simplest aspect of this is that my blog is mirrored to three services. MySpace, LiveJournal, and Facebook. The LiveJournal integration is provided by the LiveJournal Crossposter Wordpress plugin, and it’s it’s perfect. It completely mirrors your Wordpress blog to Livejournal and it works great… if you have an LJ, you should definitely give it a try. MySpace integration comes from a php script that runs on my server and is pinged when I post… it goes into my database and pulls the latest entry and posts a link to it on my MySpace blog. It is available here. Finally I just use the RSS functionality of Facebook to have it mirror my blog, works really well.

Twitter integration is done through a plugin called Twitter Tools by Alex King. It basically sends a Twitter update everytime you post that links back to your blog. It also will either create a post from each Twitter update or create a 1 post digest of all your Twitter updates each day at midnight. It works really well and integrates the services together nicely so you can use both.

This has made my life drastically easier. I post short quick updates via my cell phone to Twitter which mirrors them to my blog nightly; and I post longer updates to my blog directly, which mirrors them out to all the other services my friends might use, it’s fantastic and very streamlined. It’d be nice to have Facebook and MySpace be able to draw directly from the pictures hosted on my site and I’d like to integrate the commenting better, but I’m very happy with my setup right now.