Category: Blogging – Technical

So it’s been a couple of months since the Fall of Google Reader and the Rise of Google Plus frelled up the delicate ecosystem of content generation and sharing and management here in the Great DDtB Entertainment Network. I’m not going to go into this level of detail, but here’s how I’m publishing my daily nattering.

Note that my goal here is to own my content.  I don’t want Plus to be the primary repository for my online presence and writings.  That’s why I have a blog, which I back up, on an independent server.   If Plus goes belly-up, or Google for some reason decides to disable my account, I don’t want what I’ve written to be lost. Thus my blog (DDtB) is the hub of my publishing empire.

1. Google Plus → [Google+Blog WP Plugin] → WordPress (DDtB):  This is the main vector for information.  I share stuff to Google Plus from various apps or web pages, or manually, write up a line or several paragraphs of introductory content, and go on my way.  The Google+Blog plugin on my blog hourly aggregates that info in a reasonably nice format into blog posts (for the Plus entries where I’ve used the #ddtb hashtag). It also brings over (and updates) any comments that folks have added to the Plus posting.  I’d say 85% or more of my content is using this route

The plugin works pretty darned well, though the author has been kind of quiet of late. I know Les had problems making it work consistently, and it seems to still have difficulties reliably posting things (posts and comments) to my blog’s time zone, rather than posting them with the time it is in Greenwich.

2. Twitter → [TwitterTools WP plugin] → WordPress (this blog):  I still use Twitter for a fair number of things.  There are lots of folks I know on Twitter, and it’s much more convenient for quick 140-word blurbs — especially ones that I don’t want to generate their own blog posts.

The TwitterTools plugin does two-way posting, so also …

3. WordPress (DDtB) → [TwitterTools WP plugin] → Twitter:  Lots of WP plugins forward posts to Twitter; TwitterTools actually pulls tweets back in (see #2), and is smart enough to not include the things that it’s published out there in the first place.

4. Other Apps/Sites → WordPress (DDtB) / Twitter:  There are a lot of sites that can push things directly to WP, or else push them to Twitter, which means that they end up in my blog (see #2).  That includes GoodReads and Flickr.  If I think about it, then I have to manually share them in Plus (as in #6)

5. Google Reader → Google Plus:  I still parse through Reader, at least the main sites I follow along there.  The Plus sharing is nicely done, so I can forward whole articles like from any other web page.

There’s no way to do my “Unblogged Bits” posts the way I used to, which I sorely miss (some things just don’t deserve a full Plus or blog entry).  Missing the Shared by Other People stuff sucks, too (some folks are doing so through third parties, but it’s small beer compared to the rich Reader ecosystem I used to graze through).

6. WordPress (DDtB) → [manual sharing] → Google Plus:  Some things are just better written in WordPress:

1. Posts that link to more than one picture or website.
2. Posts that need a bit more sophisticated formatting that bold and italics and strikethrough. E.g., posts that have a lot of block quotes from another source.
3. Posts that focus on attachment types that Plus doesn’t support, such as MP3s (e.g., my Podcast).

When I do those sorts of posts natively in WordPress, I then have to manually share them over into Google Plus. Which is actually fairly trivial to do.

Note that I didn’t talk above about Facebook.  My presence there, never much to begin with, has diminished even beyond that.  With the removal of the capability to remotely post content, my blog entries (and quotations from WIST) no longer mirror there.  Fortunately, for whatever reason, my Twitter feed still goes through, which means there are then links back to my blog posts, which I guess is a way of still communicating out there (I do hop over periodically to check the Likes and respond to comments) but that’s about it.

So what’s changed in my blogging habits and patterns from before the big Reader/Plus kerfuffle?

1. Obviously, the bulk of my activity is in Plus, whereas before it was in Reader.
2. The blog is getting more actual posts, but feels more cluttered to me in some ways; items that would have been just one more “Unblogged Bit” in one of my Reader posts now takes up a whole post on its own (or, sometimes, just isn’t passed on).
3. I feel like I’m sorting through less content in some ways — my Reader usage is way down (having lost the shared Reader items I used very heavily, and because of some design changes in Reader).
4. I feel like I’m sorting through content from more and different people — I’m following 79 people, and even if some of those are people I was following in Reader and some are folks who don’t post much, I’m still getting different sorts of content than I had before.
5. As part of the previous item, I’m getting comments from new and different people than before.  I also consider my commentary more.
6. I’m getting more traffic to my blog.  I’m not sure if that’s folks following over from Plus (I know there are some), or the increased traffic from Twitter posts of the increased number of blog posts.
7. Because things are going in as individual posts, vs. Unblogged Bits items, I’m able to do a better job at applying Categories to posts (which, for the Plus items coming in I have to do manually a few times a day).

So … there’s today’s snapshot.  I wonder what will change tomorrow?