WordPress.com and Facebook Pages

No, this isn’t another post about the complexities (moral, user-orientated or otherwise) or Social Media; no, this won’t sway you into making another decision about which Social Network to use; no, I’m not trying to sell you something…

I have more than one blog with WordPress. I am an Administrator for two client’s blogs, also running WordPress.

I see there’s now a handful of options that any WP user (sorry: author) can use to spread the word. Specifically, their words. I’m not quite sure why the word “Sharing” and the word “Publicize” is used interchangeably, but there you go. No doubt the Happiness Engineers are proud that Marketing’s probably given their 1st line support people another headache.

Anyway…

I was one of the many people who got excited about being able to post directly to a Facebook Page directly from my blog (for obvious reasons!), using the above feature/s.

Unfortunately, I found difficulty sharing to FB at all from more than one blog at WP.com. Sadly, I was well away from any land-based cabling and wireless, so had to diagnose the problem through my HTC.

Having turned off access to FB for one blog, and then the other, I thought it may be a caching issue, as my Wildfire S is very prone to running out of disk-space, and so has too small a swap-file and can’t run Peep (for example). Even though I’ve only downloaded 5 app’s and moved all I can to the micro-SD card, apparently 21MB just isn’t enough for app-based Twitter. Another article for another time…

Since the browser on-board the phone is Webkit-based, I’m assuming it’s more reliable than pre-compiled Java-bytecode. Fortunately, I can delete the cache from this app’, so can continue tracking the issue.

I notice that the message to “Activate Publicize” for FB was still glaring at me, before I disconnected both the blogs but only after I connected them both.

Having turned them off and now back into the Dashboard, I notice that WP.com will happily reconnect one blog back to FB, Page-only updates and all, but I only get a blank (i.e. empty) pop-up as an answer to my repeated clicks for the second. “Harrumph-time”, methinks.

Apparently, GIMF in this instance: it turns out WP have updated their Support Page on Publicize, as well as the original Post from February last year, to reflect this. Fortunately, WP.com’s Scott Berkun is on hand to offer more advice, specifically regarding Posting to Pages when the feature was announced in early August:

Also note, currently you can only Publicize to one target: either a page or your wall. This should be more than sufficient to get your great posts out to a wide audience of your choosing.

What? Does that override the per-blog & per-user goodness?! Not yet, at least… All shall be made certain (one way or the other) when my next post at MonstaPro is Published!

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• An easy way to embed tweets in a WordPress blog: copy and paste (stevebuttry.wordpress.com)
• WordPress Essentials: Interacting With The WordPress Database – Smashing WordPress (seome.me)
• Be Careful with .htaccess ReWrite Rules and WordPress (journalxtra.com)
• Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and Google: The rise of digital monopolies (thenextweb.com)
• The Language of Social Networks (framethink.wordpress.com)
• Why You Never Really Log Out of Facebook [Privacy] (gawker.com)