The best way to publish RSS feeds to Twitter?

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Twitterfeed

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Google help with changing blog platforms

January 12, 2009 By 6 Comments

As someone who moved this blog from Blogger to the current self-hosted WordPress location back in April, I’m keenly aware of the problems you can encounter if you switch blogging platforms.

As a result, I’d defintely advise starting with WordPress, but if you’re not ready to host your own site (It’s really far more simple than it sounds!), then you’re limited to WordPress.com, which has all the functionality, but doesn’t allow you to display any advertising – a pain if you’re trying to see if something might drive some revenue, for example!

And while there are some very well-respected people using Blogger (such as Dave Cushman at Faster Future), and some good resources for some nice templates (such as BloggerBuster), I’m learning far more from the greater flexibility of WP.

Switching from Blogger should be simple in theory, but having exported, I found I had to import into a WordPress.com blog, then export from that into my hosted version – and even then a lot of posts seemed to get lost en route (They’re still on my old Blogger blog awaiting the remote possibility I’ll find the time to finish manually importing them).

Therefore it’s great news that Google (which owns Blogger), has released Google Blog Convert 1.0. It’s from the fantastically named Data Liberation team, and it’s a new Open Source project to allow you to move blog posts and comments from service to service, including Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type and LiveJournal.

It’s not only great news for anyone considering switching services.

It’s also great news if you want to use the quick and easy implementation of Blogger to get something just up and running with some adverts etc to see if it works, and then switch later.

It certainly means I’m less reluctant about using Blogger to experiment, and I’d be more likely to be enticed back by something suitable.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Moving from Blogger to WordPress – the saga continues

June 7, 2008 By 3 Comments

Once more I’ve learned a lesson about doing the appropriate research before jumping into something! My move from Blogger to WordPress ran into problems when I tried the feature to ‘auto-import from blogger’ feature, due to the fact I’m with Godaddy hosting. So I had to export from blogger, import into a WordPress.com blog, then export from there and import into my hosted WordPress blog! And even then 6 months of my blog somehow disappeared, and are still being re-added when I have time.

But on top of that I forgot to put a proper redirect for people visiting my old blog, assuming that a post telling them I’d moved, and the lack of new content would see my old blog gently slip under the waves of the Google search…Wrong!

Not only did my old blog continue to rank higher than this one (Google PR4), and still attract visitors, but if they visited an individual post, there was no indication I’d moved. And I suspect all that duplicate content is why this blog still has a Page Rank of 0. Google no like duplicate content.

Tonight, I finally sorted it out, thanks to the excellent ‘How to redirect Blogger Beta to WordPress instructions here. So now my old blog will finally be removed from Google, visitors are automatically redirected, there’s a direct redirect to individual posts where the importing actually worked, and there’s even a public information notice up explaining!

I get there in the end!

Like what you’re reading? Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and never miss a post?

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,