Thursday, February 21, 2013

Github

I'm starting to post code up on Github for the projects I'm working on. There's little up at this point, and I'm not sure how useful it will be for other people, but it's a good way to force myself to have good documentation and keep things organized. Plus it should make direct sharing of code easier. We'll see what happens...Check it out.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Managing multiple social networks

Okay...so following up on my previous post, I think I have a workflow that will work for maintaining Twitter, Google+, and Facebook accounts simultaneously. This assumes that you want everything posted on all three, and that you seed from Facebook (there are definitely arguments for segregating them, but I'm going to try to limit my posts such that there's nothing one one I wouldn't want on the others...besides, this will only share things I directly post from Facebook to the other two networks).

Using an account on  IfThisThenThat (IFTTT), it's all pretty easy. I made some of the recipes myself, but I bet they've all been made before if you want to search.

Basically you set up four simple recipes, one each for status updates and posted links, for both Twitter and Google+. (it's annoying that the status update recipe alone isn't enough, but apparently the two events are handled differently...).

Anyway, the Facebook-->Twiiter recipes are 100% straightforward, but the Google+ is a bit more complicated. I followed the tutorials here.

But with the four recipes made, anytime I post a link or status update to Facebook, it automatically pushes to Google+ and Twitter. Easy!

UPDATE: I switched to using Buffer the same day, as it makes sharing links to Facebook and Twitter super easy wit h a Chrome plugin (there are options for Firefox, Safari, etc.). Unfortunately it doesn't have support for Google+, so I'm still using the IFTTT recipe above for that.

Website updates

This whole "presence" thing online is a pain.

But I'm trying. I've made some major updates to my main IU-based webpage, and am generally pretty happy with it. It's super-simple but I figure that's a good thing. I'm also beginning to feel like my about.me is not as useful as it once was (it's pretty redundant with my main page), but that's what's on my business cards, and I do like their embeddable widgets (see the right-hand side of this page). I just want to get an easy workflow going here, because I don't want to spend a bunch of time doing social media management. Hm.
Anyway, Here's a link to my new IU page.