Updated: Finding the right blog syndication system
This is an update from an earlier post. I decided to repost it in order to share my experience from the beginning. I hope it helps someone.
Here goes one more test of Twitterfeed. I may need to try to find a different syndication system, as Twitterfeed has a little trouble publishing to Twitter, but it’s not publishing to Identica at all.
Update: 2 hours later
This post still hasn’t shown up on Twitter or Identica. It should post every 30 minutes, so it looks like there are multiple problems at once. I guess I just set up my Twitterfeed account at the wrong time.
Update: 6 hours later
Hey, it finally published. But only Twitter got it. I seriously need an alternative that will take my feed and publish it to both Twitter and Identica in a timely manner. It’s fine if it takes up to an hour, but 6 hours is a bit long.
Update: 1 day later
I finally found it! Enter dlvr.it, almost exactly what I wanted. It posts to Twitter and Identica usually in 15 minutes or less, and it even gives me more options for posting to Facebook than the Tumblr app provides. This has the added benefit of giving me just enough time to edit a post or change a publication option before the post goes live. It also gives me the option to choose any link shortener I want as long as it has a link to access the API and returns a plain text URL. This is similar to what Twitterfeed does, and it turned out to be a rather important feature to me.
I only found a couple of disadvantages using dlvr.it, and they’re not really showstoppers here. First, dlvr.it will publish the title of a post or the body, truncated to fit microblogging networks, if a title is not present, along with my short link, to the microblogging sites I have added as destinations. It doesn’t, however, supmit the truncated body if a title is present. This really doesn’t bother me that much, because it still offers more options than the “autopost” feature on Posterous. The more pressing problem is the fact that adding a new “destination,” which is just another name for the social networks where a blog post is published, is a matter of trial and error for a visually impaired person such as myself, because there appear to be no labels on the checkboxes that pop up the account authentication and settings. This was nearly a big showstopper, but I was eventually able to setup the networks where I wanted my posts published, and after that, it was smooth sailing. I also reported this problem on their getsatisfaction page, and hopefully the problem can be resolved in the near future.
Overall, in spite of the couple of problems I found, I would highly recommend dlvr.it for anyone who wants to publish a blog with an RSS feed to their social networks, no matter where their blog is hosted. At this point, it is much more reliable and has at least as many features as the more popular competitors.
Update two days later
The problem with adding a new destination when using a screen reader was fixed within two days after I reported it. Dlvr.it officially rocks, and I’ll definitely continue recommending it for anyone who needs to publish their blog feed. It gets the Kyle seal of approval.