So as the posts below this demonstrate, I’ve downloaded and am testing the Google+Blog plugin for WordPress, which, in theory, will take stuff I put into Plus and turn it into a blog post here.
That’s … probably a good thing. It does achieve what I want, which is making my blog the site of record for my stuff (which isn’t what Google wants, apparently, but …). It does have a few areas of concern or that I’ll need to pay attention to.:
- I need to be more thoughtful and discriminating about my Plus items. It appears to grab anything I do (publicly — which means I can send something to a specific circle and it will not be posted). But whereas in Reader I might choose 75-100 links to share, trivially, now everything I share through Plus turns into its own post. Yikes!
- It not only does original Plus posts on my part, but also stuff that I Share in Plus — including text from the original share and all that jazz. A bit ugly. I probably will end up relinking to those items (rather than sharing), or doing them to specific Plus circles.
- There’s a fair amount of cruft that comes up in those posts — the “comment” by me, then the link, then the excerpt and picture (if any), then a link to the original Plus post, then (until I get the $10 pay version) a link about the plugin. It’s not too bad, but it’s a bit annoying.
- The first line of the Plus post turns into the title of the blog post. I just need to be sure to follow those rules in my Plus items.
- Everything comes across as a single catogory. But since these are full-blown posts and not Potpourri linklists, I will probably need to go in and add categories after the fact (homework!).
- I need to learn a bit more about how it synchronizes. At the moment it goes back (defined number) posts, and supposedly syncs up the comments as well. It will also overwrite any changes I make in the post or title (including categories?) unless I tell it to leave already-posted items alone. Must experiment.
- There are some odd time zone issues moving from Plus into the blog. At the moment, it seems to want to post local time (MDT) at the time it would have been in the UK (Greenwich time). I.e., something I shared at Monday 9:01pm MDT in Plus shows up as a scheduled item for Tuesday 3:01am MDT because Monday 9:01pm MDT = Tuesday 3:01am UTC. That’s something the developer seems aware of, but very few folks have complained about. (Nevertheless, it does generate a Tweet as a published post. Weird.)
This will take a bit of playing with. Thanks for your patience.
103 view(s)
A further possible problem is recursion. Right now, you can only post into Plus via a +1 button or through the Plus client. I try to remember, when I have an original blog post, to do one or the other in Plus. But now that will generate an additional post back into my blog about the blog post I posted about in Plus.
Ugh.
Supposedly the plugin writer is working on something about this (to allow you to more selectively choose posts to push to the blog).
I’ll be keeping an eye open to see how well this works out for you. I never bothered to post summaries of things I shared in Reader, but seeing as my Google+ posts tend to be semi-bloggish in nature I wouldn’t be imposed to importing those into SEB. It would certainly help to increase my frequency of updating the blog.
I wonder if anyone has come up with a similar plugin that does the same thing slightly differently that might be worth checking out…
@Les This was the first one I found (and I didn’t see any commentary of “Well, I’m using X and I think it’s much better”). However, it wouldn’t surprise me if folks came up with a variety fo alternatives.
And, yes, I found the Share With Comments and the ability to suck those into my blog a good way to keep up the posting traffic. Especially since I was, in fact, commenting on the stuff (and got comments in return).