Bringing it all together
by Colin Devroe on March 14th, 2008
Ever since the day I began posting my photos to my site, rather than on a photo-sharing service like Flickr, I’ve had the desire to slowly bring all of my “stuff” onto my site rather than spread out through the Interwebs.
As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.
It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.
There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.
As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.
There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.
I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using Wordpress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.
I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?
I’ve been thinking about this very same transition for a long time.
I love the “connectivity” available with the 10 million services out there, but I hate the workload.
I also love the extensibility that Wordpress has with custom fields and the like, and I’ve been looking for tools that would allow me to push all the content created on my domain to all the services out there, so I’m not just immediately cut off.
Like a post written into a “what’s up?” category, displayed how I wanted, and sent on it’s merry way to twitter (You can do this with some ghetto rigging using Twitter Tools – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/#post-313), or photo’s attached to a gallery or post, automatically uploaded to Flickr, etc.
I would love to hear how the project comes along, and see how you’re doing it. I’ll be looking for and thinking about solutions. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.
I’ve been doing a very similar process since the beginning of the year. I felt like, why should I be stressed out trying to keep up with all the different social networks and services. They’re all wonderful, but it can be a full time job keeping up with each.
I like your idea of using your home page as the current status of the different services/networks.
I thought of a site that had a great layout and keeping everything out front, but he’s changed his design since then.
Good luck with the process. I’m going through and doing several sweeps of my accounts, cleaning out excess that’s just not needed, or canceling the service all together.
I don’t know… I think about doing this sort of thing all of the time. I used to host all of my photos on my own site, actually. But it was SUCH a hassle. Flickr made everything so much simpler, which is why I’ve stuck with them. I also dig the community over there, just as I dig the community at Viddler. I’m not sure that anybody really notices I’m there, and most of the time I feel like an outsider looking in at all of these community sites, but I do crave the human interaction I get from visiting places like Flickr and Viddler, however minimal the response to my contributions might be. I work for 10 hours a day in an office by myself, so I like to find ways to connect whenever I can. Pulling everything back onto my site, which is getting maybe 25 visitors a day (if I’m lucky), would really make me feel cut off.
Not sure if that’s helpful, or not. Sorry for the rambling.
Chris Clark: You’re definitely right, and that is a valid reason to use these services to interact with others. This approach is probably not for everyone, but I actually would rather interact with people here, on my site, rather than spread across all of these sites.
My site gets just about as much traffic as yours, but that has never really been a concern of mine actually. I’ve never really cared about statistics, I just like sharing things and having conversations about them.
So, I thank you for writing your comment here – because that is exactly what I hope will happen. More people will speak up here, instead of on other sites.
Thanks for the perspective, Colin. I’m way too obsessed with statistics for my own good.
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