Rich's Tongfamily

Well, this used to be super easy, the JetPack share post allowed unlimited sharing across Facebook, LinkedIn (and a horrible site that rhymes with Wither). But now they’ve just installed a check where you “only” get 30 cross-posts a month. With the volume that I’ve been running, it’s hard to stay under that limit.

Connecting to the top sights with Autopost and Buffer

So what do too, well most of these cross-posting things have these hard limits and while they are relatively nominal it is not like this site makes a lot of money, so here’s the solution. Load up your site with a bunch of free cross-post applications and dedicated different ones for different posts, so here is what I’m doing:

1. WordPress to Buffer (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mastodon). This allows three automatic posts to channels so that is a nice choice. And they have a server so you don’t have to have credentials like secret API keys on your site. There’s a free plug-in that pushes your content to buffer. It’s pretty easy, just set up Oauth accounts on the buffer website and then in the WordPress add-in, but enable default so that it auto posts. Although it doesn’t look like TikTok quite works unless you have a business account there.
2. Auto-post to Mastodon (if you only need this). I forgot to mention that this is not a complicated code set, basically, you hit a web API and post something, so Mastodon, as usual, is the best, this is a free tool. The main thing to remember is to click on Post to Mastodon in the publish window on each post or better yet go to Settings > Autopost to Mastodon and set “Post any new posts.”
3. JetPack (limited Facebook and Linked. This is a little problematic, it says that you get 30 cross-posts a month, but as of March 1, I didn’t get a reset, so it is hard to know what to do with this. And they only support Facebook, LinkedIn, and the bird site. But if you only post a little then this is good

The next level of sites with SNAP and WP to Telegram

1. NextScripts: SNAP. They allow one user per network for free so that is not bad, but it requires lots of setups because there is no server, and you have your credentials on your site (which can be a bit scary if you are hacked). But it is good for the next set of sites like Weibo
2. WP Telegram Autopost and Notifications. I don’t know how many folks are using this, but you do have to do quite a bit of work to get a secret from a bot called @botfather which you’ve got to love. It’s a mountain of work to get done so I’ll leave this for later

Things that I would love to get work on: ActivityPub

1. ActivityPub. I actually don’t really understand what I’ve done here, but apparently, this makes a WordPress blog look like a Mastodon or other ActivityPub instance, so you can actually follow me at https://richtong.net/author/rich and you get directly all the posts I’m making here which is pretty cool, but right now my system has some sort of error “Your author URL https://richtong.net/author/rich/ does not return valid JSON for application/activity+json. Please check if your hosting supports alternate Accept headers” which I really don’t understand. But the idea of direct subscribing is great.
2. Debugging a WordPress installation. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for me and they want to look at my log file. So that isn’t good. And turning on logging isn’t easy, it requires editing the wp-config.php file so I spent way too much time remembering how to use Cyberduck and Filezilla and could not get in at all. I had this setup with both public key encryption and login, but I think I’m trying to access the wrong node as I used to have three on Digital Ocean. Oops! I think I disabled password authentication on this so Filezilla needs to provide an SSH key but Cyberduck does this perfectly and seemed to know my key. And then I completely forgot the directory layout, but a bunch of things like upload files sizes lives in /etc/php/<whatever version you have>/php.ini, but where is public_html/wp-config.php?

Premium things that are not useful

This was great but they made auto-post a premium feature which is too bad:

1. Blog to Social. This is another freemium system but auto-posting is a premium feature so have to reject that.

While I’m at it getting rid of some plugins:

1. Bluberry. This was the first podcast plugin I used, but since we are hosting on Anchor (the new Spotify for Podcasting) we don’t need to store things there. And the Podcast Player is simpler and just redirects.
2. AMP. This was the mobile page system that was popular for a while, but most folks are discontinuing support for it.
3. Friends. This is an RSS feed between WordPress blogs. I’m not sure that it is used much. I know I’m not going to be reading from my web page an RSS feed.
4. Press This! Sad to say goodbye to this old friend, but I don’t post my clicking on a page anymore. Most of my posts are big like this one 🙂
5. Rankchecker. An SEO thing I’ve never used and it has not been updated in two years. Someday I might actually do SEO management. Some old theme demands it, so one day I’ll have to clean those themes out.