This post continues on from a previous post: Where is Your Digital Hub/Home?
In a previous post, I talked about POSSE and PESOS, and publishing on your own site vs other platforms, syndicating content back and forth and content ownership. I mentioned that I’d opted for the PESOS approach, and that I was publishing content on other platforms, then syndicating it back to my own site. Let’s take a look at how that happens.
First of all, I’m running WordPress. Since I’ve been working with WordPress for years, and since my full time job has me working with it as well, this made a lot of sense. Even without those motivators though, WordPress has a huge community, is open source, is a really solid publishing platform, is built from the ground up to be completely customizable through plugins, and has an incredibly powerful themeing system (which basically allows you to do whatever you want).
One of the other things WordPress has going for it is a long history of providing data import and export tools. You’ve always been able to get data into and out of WordPress with relative ease, so it seemed like getting a bunch more data in there would be a reasonable goal. With the advent of Post Formats (in WP 3.1), WordPress also has a native way of hinting at how different types of data should be displayed, plus Custom Post Types (since WP 3.0) mean that if you really want to get crazy, you can step completely outside of the normal “Post” model and get really custom.
One of the things that got me started down the road of actually getting control over my content was “The Great Twitter 3200 Tweet Debacle” (I made that name up). Because of technical constraints, Twitter only allows you to access your most recent 3200 tweets. I’ll give you a few seconds to let that sink in. Twitter. Only allows you to access. Your most recent 3200 tweets. Your own tweets. Has that hit home yet? Here you are producing all this stuff, thinking it’s yours, and Twitter actually decides what you can and can’t access. Before I hit that 3200 mark (I was up to around 3100 at the time), I vowed that I’d get something figured out to get a copy of all of my tweets stored somewhere that I controlled.
