Wordbooker

If you use Facebook and maintain a personal blog outside of Facebook, it may have crossed your mind that it would be nice if your blog posts were somehow linked with your Facebook feed.

I use my blog primarily for article-length posts that I want to save.  Short, random thoughts I’ll just post on Facebook, and I’m not worried about losing track of what I wrote.  Since the longer posts tend to be a bit more rare, and since few (if any) people are going to subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed, it’s nice to have a way to bring some attention to new blog posts.  Thankfully, there are several ways to have new blog posts show up in your Facebook feed.

Facebook provides a convenient way to import a blog into your Notes.  Just go to http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php and paste in the address of your blog’s feed.  Then whenever you post something to your blog, it will also show up as a note in Facebook.  However, if someone comments on your note, the comment will only exist in Facebook; you may wish that comments would be reflected on your blog page as well.

Depending on your blogging software, there have been attempts to write plugins that attempt to import comments on notes from Facebook into your blog.  I use WordPress for my blog, and there was a Facebook Comments plugin that served this purpose, but it no longer seems to work.

If you don’t feel it necessary to have your blog posts imported into Facebook as Notes, but you want an update to appear on your Facebook wall when you make a new post to your blog, there are plugins for that too.  For WordPress, the Wordbook plugin makes it easy to to this.  This plugin will just post a little one-line story on your Wall with a link to your blog post.  If someone wants to read it, they have to click over to your blog.

Today I’m trying a new method, using the Wordbooker plugin.  This plugin purports to show new blog posts on your Wall without importing them into your Notes.  If Facebook friends comment on your Wall post, those comments are supposed to be imported into your blog page as well.  I’m not sure how it’s going to work, so this post is a test.

3 thoughts on “Wordbooker

  1. I’m not sure I changed anything, but everything seems to work now. Some newer versions of Wordbooker have been released, and I’m assuming both 1&1 (my web host) and Facebook are probably making changes behind the scenes as well.

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