My Blog is Now Connected With Facebook

This week­end I did some work adding Face­book inte­gra­tion to my blog. Part of the prob­lem with the recent social media rev­o­lu­tion is hav­ing a con­sis­tent mes­sage across all plat­forms. I post to my blog, I then have to post a link to in my Face­book and Twit­ter. Recently I setup my per­sonal URL short­en­ing ser­vice at bhnet.me this has allowed me to track my clicks bet­ter and using their WP plu­gin I have been able to auto pub­lish to Twit­ter. With my new set of tools I can auto pub­lish to Face­book and allow Face­book users to eas­ily com­ment using their FB Con­nect. My ulti­mate goal is to use blakehelms.net as the hub of my dig­i­tal pres­ence and have all the dif­fer­ent out­lets flow­ing into it. Uni­fied com­ment­ing so that no mat­ter where the con­ver­sa­tion is it always finds its way back to my server. Smash­ing Mag­a­zine wrote a great tuto­r­ial on some of the basics of get­ting your blog inte­grated. I will con­tinue to doc­u­ment this endeavor.

Update: The method described in the Smash­ing Mag­a­zine arti­cle worked won­der­fully but I found a plu­gin that I feel offers tighter inte­gra­tion. It’s called Word­Book. I also switched my com­ment­ing sys­tem to ECHO which also offers Face­book Con­nect inte­gra­tion. The ECHO ser­vice costs $12 a year and offers some great fea­tures includ­ing pulling in com­ments from Twit­ter and Friend­Feed. If you are just want­ing Face­book Con­nect I would still highly rec­om­mend the plu­gin from the arti­cle. I am start­ing to write the first in a series of posts called “Mas­ter of Your Domain: How to Man­age Your Dig­i­tal Pres­ence on Your Own Terms” where I will go more in depth into ECHO.

If you have a Face­book account (and I know you do!) leave a com­ment using FB Con­nect so I can try out the system!