Cross-Posting Everywhere: Ping.fm

After spending several weeks getting familiar with the various API systems available for interacting with social networking sites, I was starting to get tired of the disparate arrangements provided and the spotty feature fulfillment. I succeeded in setting up a micro/status blog that cross-posts status updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

Remote publishing to Twitter took an hour or two to get working correctly by using CURL to interface with it.

Remote publishing to Facebook took about two weeks, but that was mostly due to my persistence in wanting to publish status/micro blogs instead of normal ones.

Remote publishing to MySpace was looking like it would take until the MySpace developers got their API working correctly. However, in the process of trying to figure this one out, I stumbled on Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is, essentially the uber-cross-poster that I have been looking for. Setting it up took less time than setting up a direct Twitter cross-poster. Now I don't have to keep hunting down API's and libraries for using them to cross-post anymore; I just add them to my profile on Ping.fm when they become available.

Special thanks go out to Dmitri Gaskin for writing the PHPingFM class that I'm using to interface with Ping.fm. Visit his site to read more about it.

In my implementation, I simply hacked it onto the end of articles_adminapi_create. It would be a relatively simple module to write, but I think that it's sufficient for now to just point the way.

In the meantime, you can now catch my status updates on just about any social networking site I have a profile on, in case you just aren't down with visiting Ivory-Tower all the time.

Just remember, it all starts here!