Using dlvr.it for cross-posting from Dreamwidth

[jducoeur]

Since I'm pretty sure some folks care, here are my findings on cross-posting.

Background: my journal is largely public, and I like to have it disseminated to where people want to read it -- Facebook (FB hereafter), Twitter (TW), whatever. (While I think DreamWidth (DW) is the best place for following one's friends, the reality is that most of my friends are only on FB.) LiveJournal (LJ) has had built-in cross-posting to those services for a long time now, and I've been using that; even after I moved to DW, I've been cross-posting from DW to LJ, and thence to FB and TW. But now that I'm thinking of dropping LJ entirely, the question is how I keep the other services in the loop.

After doing some research (and finding that most of the crosspost-to-FB services have gone away in the past two years), I came to the conclusion that the most robust option seems to be dlvr.it. We are not their primary target market: they are really focused on marketing people who want to be able to write something once and then spew it widely, and their Pro plan is oriented to that. But they do have a Free plan, and their service -- take RSS feeds and post them to social networks -- is more or less what we need. I've been using it for a few days, and it seems to work.

To get this up and running:

• Go to the DreamWidth FAQ about RSS feeds, which should show the URLs of your feed.
• Sign up for dlvr.it. I signed up using my Facebook account.
• Once you're signed up, it will take you their "Automate" page. There, you set up an automation with a "Feed" (the URL of your DreamWidth RSS feed) connected to one or more "socials" (Facebook, Twitter, whatever). The Free plan allows you to take up to 5 Feeds as inputs and 3 Socials as outputs.

That's pretty much it, and it seems to work pretty well; I might even upgrade to Pro eventually, if I decide to use this for official Querki stuff.

That said, some caveats:

• Most importantly, this is a third-party service, and they conspicuously indirect all links through themselves. This stuff is really only for public posts anyway, but keep in mind that they are probably doing traffic analysis on who clicks through to your DW page.
• dlvr.it requires slightly more FB permissions than I love. I believe I understand why they require what they do, but basically you have to agree to all of the permissions required by all of their features, even if you aren't using all of those features.
• dlvr.it is a commercial service, and they support themselves with subscriptions. They really want you to be buying their Pro service, which is expensive. ($10/month) They don't seem to be nasty about Free users, but be prepared to see "Try Pro Now -- Free Trial!" buttons on all the screens.
• They provide a good deal of control over how cross-posts show up, and I had been quite encouraged that there was a "Status Update" option -- that is, cross-post the post in its entirety to Facebook. Sadly, though, it looks like links don't survive the process, so I've backed off to simply posting links.
• The Free plan is explicitly a bit slow in its cross-post speed -- they only check for new posts every half hour. (Unsurprisingly, the plans that cost real money are quicker.)

So -- that appears to be a viable approach to cross-posting from here without LiveJournal in the middle. There are likely other possibilities. (It looks to me like IFTTT is possible, although I'm not sure how well that would work.)

Anybody have other suggestions?

Comments

[laurion]

As mentioned elsewhere, if you run your own Wordpress, there are good plugins (such as Social Network Auto Poster) that will post to DW and all the other locations. This does not work with Wordpress.com, because they don't let you pick your own plugins very much. They'll do Twitter and Facebook, but not DW. But not everyone can or wants to run their own install of Wordpress.

For those looking to start with DW at the center, you might also check out Zapier. They have an RSS to Facebook and RSS to Twitter flow. They're pretty much the Pepsi to IFTTT's Coke.

[jducoeur]

For those looking to start with DW at the center, you might also check out Zapier. They have an RSS to Facebook and RSS to Twitter flow. They're pretty much the Pepsi to IFTTT's Coke.

Intriguing! I've just signed up and kicked the tires. It does seem similar to IFTTT -- not quite as easy to use, but significantly more powerful and flexible. I experimentally set up a DW-to-Facebook-and-Twitter Zap, and it wasn't terribly difficult.

On the downside, they're *insanely* expensive for anything beyond the Free plan ("Basic" is $20/month, and it goes way up from there), and surprisingly pushy: even for the Free plan, they're prompting me to "Edit Billing Info" -- that is, give them my credit card. And in practice, while they are much more flexible than dlvr.it, I don't see any *practical* advantage: I don't see any straightforward way to configure Zapier to produce a better result than dlvr.it.

(After some experiments, it looks to me like the lack of links when posting a Status Update is probably an implicit limitation of the way the pieces all connect together. I suspect it's possible to use Zapier to get it all Just Right, but would require writing a custom JavaScript stage to parse and reformat the HTML manually -- not a minor job.)

So I suspect that dlvr.it is the more practical option for most people -- it's easier to set up, works decently well out of the box, and is quite a lot cheaper if you decide to buy into it. Zapier looks good if you want to do fancier custom stuff...