PingPressFM
So sometime back last week I was all excited about a tool that was called Ping.FM. Matter of fact I am still excited about that particular tool and rather than rehash that all here, you should just click on that link and go read. However, in the same blog entry I jumped on the bandwagon of a tool called PingPressFM – obviously a counter part to the former. I perhaps made that jump a little too soon.
Call me old-fashioned but I just really did not like what PingPressFM was doing for me as a tool. First was the fact that it took a long time to figure out exactly the steps to get it to work. This was largely because of a late eve when I was looking at it and the instructions were written for the WordPress 2.6 admin interface and I am running the radically different 2.7 admin interface.
I did not like the minimum documentation either. I basically had to click all three of the major default options and then match what they were to which effect they caused. Somewhere in there was the one that I was really wanting, which was to give a link to my blog posts automatically and ping that information along with the link to the blog out to all the different social networks and other sites that I was involved on that I normally do a manual posting of such information too.
Along with that was an option that would pick up the full blog entry and put as much as it could in the allocated form length and usually leave it hanging in mid-word. Lastly was what? I don’t recall now what the third option did.
Anyway, a few hits and misses and finally I got everything to work. My first attempt ended up with three comments that were “pinged” back to the first post on the blog as well as put out to all my different social networks, attempting on most to create it as a tag line all three times. It also did this on the with all three on the Ping.FM widget that was running the sidebar of the blog. Lastly, since the format was right and you could post a full blog entry from Ping.FM, I got an entire 2nd copy of the original post to show up in the blog here on mephistos.com.
After sorting through who was doing what, I did get it to give me a short intro the blog, granted randomly cut off on the middle along with a shortened URL. Well, I would rather get to choose where it cuts it and frankly, if you are not using a phone with internet capabilities who cares about the shortened URL?
I have just decided that the information is not enough to entice a user to the site in general and the ugly not meaningful URLs just do not stick in a person’s head like an actual entry of the mephistos.com of something like http://www.mephistos.com/2009/01/20/pingpressfm/ and maybe still generate traffic to my blog. The ugliness of http://tiny.ur/32af3 is just not memorable and if anything will remind you to go somewhere else instead.
Not to fear, found a better solution for the whole of it anyway and will be ‘sharing‘ that in an upcoming blog shortly. In the meantime, continue with ping.fm and backend that to twitter and all your other social/networking/connection places – even your phone. But I suggest you avoid PingPressFM or be willing to live with it being ugly. On the other hand, if you are doing one line ‘mini‘ blogging – that rock and roll with the tool.
