Sunday, June 8, 2008

Crossposting from Blogger to MySpace

[update: be sure to check the comments thread for additional information!]

Lately I've been whining a lot about how much time I spend keeping all the social networks updated with musical news and notes regarding Dan Beahm and The Invisible Three (so here's some more whining, bitches!). I've been exploring various setups, plug-ins, platforms, etc... but there doesn't seem to be any good way to simply create a blog entry and have it cross-post elegantly.

There's a decent plug-in for Wordpress that will automatically post a note or even your whole blog post to your MySpace blog, but nothing for Blogger to do the same. This alone is almost reason enough to port my Blogger-hosted blog to Wordpress, but I feel that I get more exposure using Google's Blogger platform. I've converted two of my Blogger sites to the Wordpress platform, but this one (The Invisible Blog) is staying at Blogger for the time being. Not to mention: the Wordpress plug-in seems to be fairly hinky anyway, as MySpace changes things all the time that prevent the Wordpress crossposting plugin to work consistently or effectively.

I despise most things about MySpace, but there's no denying that the vast majority of my "new fan" traffic comes from there, so though I loathe the beast, I simply cannot abandon MySpace altogether. And as long as I'm getting traffic there, I'd like to utilize the site to my greatest advantage, which means making sure all my brilliant blog musings are posted for those people who don't frequent The Invisible Blog to see.

MySpace released "apps" on May 20, basically a rip-off of all the garbage that you can add to Facebook (super-poke, super-wall, green patch, and all those annoying things that people constantly use to passively maintain friendships or acquaintances), but I don't see any useful things developing there (i.e. a blog crossposting app).

A fairly exhaustive two hour search regarding cross posting turned up a whole lot of nothing, so in an attempt to turn shinola into gold, I've created this post regarding the issue to see how many people find this site searching for a way to get Blogger to auto update to your MySpace blog. I'm sure there are tons of people wishing, longing, yearning for the solution, but coming up empty handed like I did.

Please leave a comment (or better yet buy an album!) if you found this site searching for Blogger-MySpace crossposting solutions.

...

47 comments:

iBank said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
iBank said...

haha,
I am trying to figure that out right now.

My goal is to have one place to post an article and have it go to all my social networks - blogger, myspace, facebook, etc and I couldn't find a way to get from blogger to myspace. I had hope when I realized I could get wordpress to post to myspace and blogger but the plugin I found requires you to have access to the plugin directory, something that wordpress.com doesn't offer.

Anyway, I'm off to look for more solutions!

From the iBank.com ibankpressreleases.blogspot.com's com/tech team good luck and I'll let you know if I find anything.

P.S. that plugin that I found that I can't use is at http://clickmomukhamo.com/blog/archives/2008/02/10/how-to-cross-post-to-multiply-blogger-and-vox/

The Invisible said...

Thanks for checking in, iBank person.

I checked the post for the plugin you mention, but it doesn't allow for cross posting to MySpace. It only takes advantage of Blogs that allow e-mail posting (which, you could just do from an e-mail account by "sending" to those addresses). The plug-in is good for auto-updating various Blogs if you're creating the initial post from Wordpress, but I'm looking to get MySpace to update from Blogger.

So... still looking!

Troy said...

Dan, have you checked out Blog It? It's from TypePad. The only spot that I don't think it will update for you is MySpace.

http://www.typepad.com/features/blogit.html

(though, reading through the comments, doesn't sound too popular.)

Maybe it's something to watch? Hopefully it will get better?

The Invisible said...

MySpace is the one I'm most interested in, mostly because their Blog setup is FUCKING AWFUL, but also because I don't like going there in the first place.

But since other people do, and it seems to STILL be used as a mark of your "working status," I feel obligated to keep it up to date.

iBank said...

yeah sorry, I forgot to include this link: http://noumenon.roderickrussell.com/wordpress-to-myspace-auto-crossposting
in my scenario that I described above.

This lets wordpress post to myspace. So in the end you would be able to post on wordpress and have it go to both blogger and myspace but it doesn't help you since you want to post at blogger.

oh well

The Invisible said...

Aha! But it does solve my problem! I could set up a "dummy account" using Wordpress that would post to my (real) Blogger site and my MySpace page.

Thanks for the link update, iBank person.

Ben Hammond said...

I'm looking for the same thing... We coding musicians should band together in an anti-Myspace coalition.

Anyways, I will offer up ArtistData.com to those of you struggling, it doesn't help for the blog situation, but its great for automatically submitting gig info to multiple sites (Myspace included). Any time spent away from Myspace is an improvement. Good luck!

Rob Timko said...

I found your blog by searching for a way to cross post from blogger to wordpress (so I can then cross post from Wordpress to Myspace). Did you ever figure out how to do it?

The Invisible said...

Rob... there are definitely Blogger to Wordpress solutions out there.

Unfortunately though, MySpace seems to be keeping a pretty tight grip on the code to update their users' blogs from external sources (to force people to actually log in and use the MySpace blog interface).

I think this is hurting them greatly, as I find myself using MySpace less and less, and I assume others are as well.

Not to mention that MySpaces blog interface is still atrocious.

As an added note... be careful about having multiple blogs with the exact same text (blogger, wordpress, etc...) as search engines will view them as spam type material and your search ranking will drop.

I am searching for a solution only to keep MySpace updated with my blog entries for those people who are too lazy (or not interested enough) to leave MySpace and visit my actual blog.

Anonymous said...

I'm in the same boat as ibank, trying to find something that will post EVERYWHERE.

No luck yet but, in my searchings, I found something that might help you out.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/crosspost
I haven't tried it so I've no idea if it's any good.

From the blurb: "Currently supported blogging service providers include Blogger, Livejournal, MySpace, and Xanga."
If wordpress was in that list I would be all over it.

BrianShiro said...

I also loathe Myspace but keep an profile there for those people who still cling to that outdated social network. I've been looking for a way to crosspost my blogger posts on Myspace for quite some time, and I have also come up empty-handed. Facebook, by the way, makes it really easy to crosspost your external blogs into Facebook Notes. All you have to do is give it the URL of your blog's RSS feed. I wish it were that easy in Myspace.

Unknown said...

I don't know if anyone has found a better way than what I've done but here are two ways to do it:

http://www.ping.fm will allow you to not only post blog posts to multiple sites but also update any (and just about all) microblogging sites as well (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). The down side is all you can post is text unformatted which makes this almost useless.

The second way is to use the Scribe Fire plug in for Firefox. It will allow you post to multiple blogs including Myspace, Blogger, and Wordpress. Once you've setup the plug in and your various blog accounts you can post the same entry to all or some of them. Unfortunately you have to select individually the blogs you want to post to one at a time and you are tied to using a computer you can do this on. So if you are on a public computer (library, work, etc.) then you can't post this way (I know there is work arounds for this as well but that's to complicated for this comment to explain).

I am still searching for a web based solution that will allow me to post to blogger and have it cross-post to Myspace. Anyone else?

Michael J. Epstein said...

I've been working on the same for what might be years at this point. Ping.FM no longer even does myspace blog posts. I am eager to know of a solution, but it looks like no one has one.

The Invisible said...

@Brian: congrats on being the closest to presenting a viable solution! ScribeFire looks great, but apparently it has recently stopped working (judging by the Mozilla Add-ons comments page).

I installed the add-on to Firefox and got it to recognize my MySpace and Blogger blogs. And while the interface looks promising, it's simply not working at the moment.

This is exactly what we're looking for, so hopefully it gets fixed soon in an update from the creators.

@everyone: thanks for following this post and thread... currently this is the most visited post on my blog, so obviously people are looking for solutions. Hopefully we'll find one soon!

Unknown said...

Happy to help! Also wanted to point out that ScribeFire published an update to the extension, has this fix it for anyone?

The Invisible said...

I installed the ScribeFire update the day it was released, and while it fixed posting to Blogger, posting to MySpace still doesn't work for me (the main thing I'm looking for).

I also still need to figure out how to correctly configure FTP for photos and other media via ScribeFire (just haven't spent the time yet), so currently I can't post pics/media from ScribeFire.

If anybody has the MySpace functionality working, please let us all know (and give us a clue as to what you might have done to get it working)!

As an aside, I believe there have been some add-ons made for Firefox that allow cross-posting to Facebook "notes." I believe this add-on allows formatting, so it's better than the Ping.FM that Brian mentioned.

Thanks again to Brian for pointing ScribeFire out to us!

I also read somewhere that supposedly the new relationship between ScribeFire and Zemanta is bringing the program closer to a webbased solution (but I'm not sure about the specifics of that).

wyrdmaege said...

And it won't. Received this mssg today:
Comment 5 by guardian.techsupport, Yesterday (24 hours ago)

Unfortunately my contact to myspace support was not fruitful and they ultimately came
back and said that there is nothing wrong on their end and they can't help if
thirdparty software doesn't work and to contact the maker of the software. Hopefully
you will have a better luck but doubtful.

So. Gossip says it's MySpace's fault and MySpace says it's the developer's fault and the developer has not said anything. The only other solution I've found is the latest MySpace toolbar add on for FireFox. I guess you could do a copy/paste from ScribeFire to the MySp Toolbar (or vice versa). Still not one-stop shopping, but doesn't force you to actually go to MySpace to update the blog.

Unknown said...

I wanted to follow up and mention that you can connect your blogger blog (or any RSS feed for that matter) with Facebook "notes" pretty simply. Once you've logged into Facebook, click on Applications on the toolbar in the very bottom left hand side, find Notes and select it. Click the link to "My Notes" up at the top and in the right hand column there is an option to import a blog into it. Facebook recommends that you only import form one source so choose wisely. Since I only use Blogger for posts, this lets me post to Blogger only and the posts show up as if I typed them in Facebook. Now if MySpace would implement this it would be perfect!

Personally I am trying to distance myself from Myspace. I know the musicians have to have a Myspace blog but with how locked in you are with the platform it's worth it to switch! Sorry about the rant!

I'm still keeping a look for the "perfect" solution and will keep you posted if I find it!

Cheers!

The Invisible said...

Thanks for the info Brian and Wyrdmaege.

Strangling Marilyn said...

Nice topic, Read it all and am beginning my own investigation. This can't be an impossible mission.

Jenne said...

Recently came across your blog. I am in the same boat as ibank. I work for a library and I don't want to have to copy and paste all my blogger posts to myspace.

Hope a solution arises!

Sneaky Ninja Quick Bunny said...

I've been on a mission to discover a method behind the madness. Sadly, it seems that no one has been able to crack the MySpace code for cross-posting in their blog. Ping no longer works, unfortunately, and all other things I have tried through Live Writer have failed as well.

However, a very small and quick fix for those looking to make their blogs available to their MySpace followers is a MySpace app called News Merger. It's an app you place on your main page that offers RSS feeds galore. This is where I have my blogs feeding for MySpace.

I'm desperately searching for the answer to all this nonsense though. There has to be a way to cross-post, because quite frankly, I don't want to resort to copy/past just so people don't have to click another button on my MySpace page to read a blog on Blogger. People could be less lazy and use their own RSS feeders, but it's much easier to get your blogs out into the world if you can cross-post like a crazy person!

djemmers said...

well,
I have an rss feed from the news on my site, succeeded in letting twitter and hyves automatically getting that rss and showing up in the blogs.

Now I am looking for the same to facebook and myspace.

Did you use rss to do yours?

Musical Daddy said...

Facebook is easy - there's a button in the "notes" section that allows you to import blogs based off of the RSS feed.

I use "twitterfeed.com" to post my blogspot blog to Twitter, and that's pretty good. There is sometimes a strange time lag - will post closely-written entries in the wrong order, will sometimes wait six or seven hours before updating - but you get what you pay for (free).

I'd love to crosspost to Myspace, but I haven't figured it out.

Chris Alvarez said...

Well, I guess now that Myspace syncs with Twitter, if you use something like twitterfeed, friendfeed, etc. you can at least update your status with the latest blog news or snippets.

Maybe not the complete answer you're looking for but I hope it helps. Also, we're living in a twitter world for the time being everything is pumping through twitter in an alarming rate. It can't be ignored right now.

-c

Ben Neal said...

MySpace is soooo backwards it's incredible. Good Blog. Shame about MySpace... A huge, dying, ugly, and incredibly confused beast I think.

Anonymous said...

MySpace - a beast you would rather ignore but cant at the cost of alienating users who are still on there - anyone remember AOL?

still no crossposting solution in sight :-(

Blue Writer said...

Thanks for the posts guys! I read through the dialogue and found it very helpful. I too am having the same issue!

I'm still searching the web for a solution.

I'll let you know if I find anything on my end!

The Invisible said...

For all intents and purposes, I've pretty much given up on MySpace. They're a dying animal that was never really very pretty in the first place. I'll still answer messages from there, and I suppose I'll update shows and post a song every now and again, but they simply make things too difficult to bother with anymore.

You may want to check out my latest post on Windows Live Writer. It's a surprisingly great tool (from MicroSoft of all places) that makes it really easy to post to multiple blogs using rich formatting. I really like how you can see what you're post will actually look like while you compose the post (background, pics, etc.). I'm really digging it.

Nancy Catherine said...

I love that I can post to blogger and it automatically posts to my FB fan page. I just wish that I could do the same with myspace. Maybe I'll just remove the blog module and encourage people to fan me on FB rather than continue to try to use myspace.

The Invisible said...

Yeah... in not allowing cross-posting or even posting from 3rd party blog tools like Live Writer, MySpace is putting yet another nail in its giant, burning coffin. It's astounding to me that a monster suffering from such "rats abandoning the ship" syndrome continues to ignore the only thing that can save it (its users). Good riddance, MySpace.

J. Derek Allred said...

Dear Dan,

I admire the hell out of the design you've applied to The Invisible Blog. I especially like the cassette tape, which have have similarly incorporated into my far less interesting blog, http://steepspiralstaircase.blogspot.com/.
With that said, I was hoping that you could instruct me on how I might encode a similar pop-up window into my blog; one that would be the size of the cassette, perhaps even adjustable like yours is, and allow my three regular readers to surf the blog and the web as a whole with the music continuing to stream.

I'm sure you're plenty busy with all sorts of postings and projects. But if you can find the time to lend me some of your phat coding wisdom, I'd be grateful.

Thanks a ton.

The Invisible said...

Thanks, J. Derek. The cassette is a design I made from scratch, but the code for the pop-out window is easily found with a Google search. There are two main elements. One is a link (with a little Java) that spawns the pop-out window to hold the Flash player, and the other is a Java window resizer that exists on the page that populates the pop-out window (set it to the size you want your player to be). There should be tons of links with information on the web. Hope this helps!

undergroundbastard said...

Helluva comment thread.

Just logged into Mypig for the first time in 370 days to see if it had reformed itself - and like all y'all, looking to crosspost so I wouldn't have to muddy my feet.

To no avail.

F*** Rupert Murdoch and his investment.

Great blog here, btw.

Process 9 said...

I think I may have found a solution to cross posting to blogspot blogs and syncing up with your myspace page. I found a myspace app that I think is text only, have not tried uploading pictures through it yet. Here is the link to the myspace app. http://www.myspace.com/rssreader after you install the app to your myspace page go to your msypace configuration panel to move the app where you want it on your myspace page, and you will also probable need to change the type font color to something other than black which sets up text color black by default. Next just copy and paste your RSS blogspot blog feed url in place of the google RSS feed which is there by default. Hope this helps your pickle.

undergroundbastard said...

Thanks, brother! Just set it up quick 'n' jiffy and even donated $3 to the developers. Look forward to sticking with your blog, though. Best, ugb.

alibee13 said...

Just wanted to say thanks for the RSS feed app idea - I have pix and they came over just fine. The trick was playing with the layout to make things fit, but it sure beats the copy/paste method.

It had been two months since I last visted Myspace and I didn't even miss it. I just wanted to cross-post by blog in hopes of generating more traffic to it.

Hopefully this will help! :)

Lincoln Crimestoppers said...

We were looking for an easy way to have our Myspace page linked to our blogger site. We already had the facebook figured out, but Myspace was a challenge. Thanks for the posts, you solved the issue for us.
The RSS reader works!

Magaly Guerrero said...

This truly sucks butt! I got to you through a Google search, trying to find a way to crosspost from Blogger to MySpace, well now I'm just annoyed too. Sigh. MySpace is even messing with my links from other sources ;-(

The Invisible said...

@Magaly: check the comments for this post for possible workarounds. It would seem that there's an RSS-incorporating solution that's doing an OK job of taking care of the problem at the moment... I just haven't had time to check it out and update the original post yet.

Delta said...

Ahh, thank god for that MySpace RSS app. I've been pulling my hair out for years over all the same issues as everyone else. Thank so much!

Kay Rich said...

I found this site searching for Blogger-MySpace crossposting solutions. >:( darn lol

Unknown said...

I guess I will be going on Wordpress as well...

Stuck In Syndey said...

Im still testing it but ive been able to use twitterfeed to push my blog updates to twitter and facebook, from there, twitter then cross posts it to Myspace. It also cross posts to ping, which will x post to almost anything and a few others.

Cheers

Rhythm Bomb Rec. said...

cool its working with the rss feed !!! thanks for this inspiration !
http://www.myspace.com/rhythmbombrecords and hotrodhussies.blogspot.com are in tune now ! cheers Ralph

Anonymous said...

Hello not sure if this issue is resolved but Ive heard of a facebook app that is supposed to be able to post to all major networks and blogs using facebook as primary posting platform. It is either called Post It or Blog It I forget which but it is definately on of them.