My G+ Metastasis System Described Short Version: I have cobbled together a rickety system to…

My G+ Metastasis System Described

Short Version: I have cobbled together a rickety system to originate content in G+ and have it appear in Twitter, Facebook and/or my blog – all controlled by hashtags.

Very Long Version:

I've grown weary of the fragrmentation of my social media existence. I've been looking for a way to have one single point of entry for my content. My original idea was to post everything to my blog in a special "microblog" category and have things push from there. The holdup is that G+ is not only hard to write to but apparently the SMS posting loophole has been closed:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/google-plus-discuss/mobile/HxlC9BnrHiw

I opted to start with the +Mike Elgan sharing system as described here:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227098/Elgan_How_I_publish_from_Google_?taxonomyId=169&pageNumber=1

I'm using a large chunk of that for my system, so Mike gets the bulk of the credit for this. The key point there is the steps that use Pluss Feed Proxy for G+: 

http://pluss.aiiane.com/

then piped through Feedburner. (I'm experimenting with not laundering through Feeburner and using the Pluss Atom feed directly.) Once that is done, an RSS feed (or Atom) exists of all your Google+ posts. Given that, there are a lot of things that can happen. Mike Elgan has ManageFlitter as the posting system, which I set up. I also have now set up basically the same thing using only IFTTT rules, all driven by hash tags.

If the post contains #twt, then tweet it:

https://ifttt.com/recipes/74107

If the post contains #fb, then post to Facebook:

https://ifttt.com/recipes/74108

If the post contains #blog, then post to my blog:

https://ifttt.com/recipes/74109

Future Work:

The thing I like least about this is the way the title in the Atom or RSS feed comes from the G+ post. I'd like to have it truncuate at the newline if the post begins with a short paragraph, rather than just run on until it runs out of characters. The Pluss Feed Proxy server code is open source. I'm considering getting my own copy, making that change and running my own instance. I think I'd rather submit a patch and have that go into the server that is already there.

https://github.com/ayust/pluss

As mentioned above, I'm trying this with and without Feedburner in the middle. Mike Elgan cites the cleanup of the feed as the reason to use it. It does also add a lot of latency and one more link in this chain. Since the whole thing is a brittle Rube Goldberg machine, every one of those you can eliminate is one fewer place for it to break. 

For now, I'm going to run with this a while and see how it works. This will be a sizable post on the blog by the time it pushes there, and too long for Facebook to get the whole thing. It will be an interesting experiment just to see the different levels of truncation and how everything handles it. 

I'm interested in any feedback people have. If you use this, or improve it, let me know your experience. I got it from Mike and made some twists, so let me know what twists you make, please.

Elgan: How I publish from Google+
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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

4 thoughts on “My G+ Metastasis System Described Short Version: I have cobbled together a rickety system to…”

  1. I’m glad you are including your blog as one of the repositories as it will probably outlast some of these other services.

    It’s too bad one can’t have IFTTT write directly to G+. I’m using IFTTT to post content from my blog to Twitter and Tumblr. I’m thinking about adding LinkedIn and/or FB to the mix, but only for posts in certain categories.

  2. This definitely makes you more accessible to your readers. I have ended up with 2 diffrent G+ accounts, neither of which can I keep up with while dealing with the rest of what I might read, much less what all is going on in meatspace. I’ll be quite happy to check in here occasionally and start seeing stuff again.

    With the same content going to several different streams, do you worry about some readers seeing you too many times?

  3. JP – that is actually something that bugs me. It feels like I’m rewarding G+ by making them primary because they are the only service in the change that is not easily writeable. I’ve got the hash tags that make it chooseable per post. I’m going to add a pair for FB and Twitter that don’t include a link to G+ to be used for short statuses that are self-contained.

  4. Shannon, to quote from my spiritual leader Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius: “Too much is always better than not enough.”

    When I use Friend Stream on my phone, people who share tweets and FB statuses and who I have on both regularly show up contiguously. It doesn’t bother me and I’ve grown used to it. It’s easy to skip over something you’ve already seen and a better problem than information not propagating.

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