Well, one of these days, I’ll move my main site to the JAMStack, but for now, I’m still on WordPress for tong family.com and one of the cool things that jetpack gives you for free is cross posting to Facebook, Twitter, Linked and Tumblr I think. As an example right now I probably the same number of views on LinkedIn as I do on organic search (the main way people find this blog). So it is worth it to cross post.
But lately I’ve been using Reddit a lot more and cross posting there (and other places) seems like a decent idea if it is free. It turns out to be pretty difficult to do. IFTTT has a cross poster, but it only works on WordPress.com sites and not on self-hosted ones.
But there is Blog2Social which seems like a great tool. It does cost money like $75 a year, but it does give you cross-posting to Reddit and Medium for instance. The free version by the way requires you to manually kick off and only allows a single destination.
Reddit requires that you post into a specific subreddit. That’s a little complicated with a Blog like this, so I made a specific community for this. I would actually it just post to u/richtong, but it turns out the trick is to go to the home page and then at the upper left, there is a pulldown and all the way down at the bottom is Create Community then you can make a public community like r/richt and then all your posts just appear in your user feed which is about what you want.
One issue is that with sites like Instagram where you have 2-Factor Authentication turned on, the Blog2Social does not work. It looks like it uses OAuth with things like Reddit, but with Instagram it does a direct login, this does not work on sites with 2-Factor authentication. Instead, you need to generate an application-specific password that bypasses this check. Way less secure, but it’s really the only way.
So more on this once I decide if it is worth it to spend $70 a year to cross post to Medium (probably) and Substack although that is not included on that list.
