Mega-Geeky Disney, Superhero, & Tech Nerd
I’ve known about WordPress for a long time, and this is the first time I’m really playing with it in order to integrate a blog into my online presence. Like many these days, I have a Twitter account, so I made this my first target for integration. There were four primary goals here:
Well, I bailed on Su.pr fairly quickly. It simply would not work, and I don’t have a high degree of tolerance for things that are not well documented. Don’t get me wrong I have no beef with StumbleUpon – they are a great site. I just think the Su.pr service requires better documentation. That’s all.
That had be head to the plugin directory at the WordPress site. Didn’t take long to find something that seems like it will do the job for me: Twitter Tools.
While the plugin can do cross polination (meaning Tweets go to the Blog, and Blog posts go to Twitter), for my needs I really only want a one way trail. The way I have things now my Tweets already go to Facebook (again see social links on the top right of the blog). This means that when the plugin posts to Twitter, I’ll also get that reflected on Facebook. For me that works.
It also has some other features: Daily and Weeky Digests. I’ve went with Weekly. I simply don’t feel that I’m a prolific enough Tweeter to need a Daily Digest, but that a Weekly one makes sense. I’ve set it to post at 6pm every Friday night when Shabbat starts. This works for me because normally I don’t Tweet or post on Facebook during Shabbat since this marks the end of my week.
The final feature I turned on is the visible one with the widget on the right hand side. It needs some CSS work still, but it’s ok for now. I have it showing my last 3 tweets. I’m not entirely clear how often this updates – I’ll have to keep an eye out.
So here it is, my new fangled blog. It’s WordPress – mostly for simplicty / ease of use. Oh sure I’ve played with more complex CMS/blogging software before like Drupal – but I hadn’t really played much with WordPress before, and wanted to give it a shot. So far me like.
As I set up my blog, I’m deciding which WordPress plugins to use or not use. Taking it slow, don’t want to overwhelm. Right now the main goal is to connect this blog with the rest of my online persona (see top right of the blog).
My first choice was Sociable in order to allow people who visit to reference anything they find here of interest with their social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). The interface for the settings for this plugin is great, you just pick which icons you want to show, and where in your blog you want to show them (pages, posts, etc.), and they show up. You can change their order with ease. You can theme it with CSS which is fantastic – it visually has a lot of fat in the CSS by default, very easy to trim down. The creators of this plugin did a fantastic job with customization. Worst icon choice: Print – not sure why it doesn’t use the browser’s print function.
I’ve also giving Su.pr a shot too. Not choosing the toolbar as I feel that’s a little invasive, but I also understand and respect the reasons for why it exists. In theory this post should get shot to both Twitter and Facebook. It might show up on Facebook twice. If it does I’ll fix that tomorrow, and sorry for any confusion.
Edit: Looks like the Su.pr thing didn’t work. Will try to sort it out tomorrow.