Before reading this post, you might want to read WordPress/Facebook/Twitter, Round 3.
Two years later, here we are again. For two years, things have been working as planned. When I post new posts on robohara.com, notifications get posted to Facebook (via the FacePress plugin) and Twitter (via WordTwit). When I need to update both Facebook and Twitter at the same time, I’ve been using TweetDeck.
Over the past week FacePress, WordTwit, and TweetDeck have all stopped working. Cheese and rice, man.
It started with TweetDeck, which forced an upgrade and then informed users that the new version no longer supports Facebook. Essentially that means that TweetDeck now only supports Twitter. That’s stupid. If it only supports Twitter, then why would I use TweetDeck? The entire point of TweetDeck was that I could funnel multiple social streams into one single interface. If TweetDeck only supports Twitter, then I’m not sure what purpose it serves. From now on I’ll just go back to using Twitter’s default interface. TweetDeck has been deleted.
Here we go again.
While troubleshooting TweetDeck, I noticed that my last couple of blog posts didn’t get posted on either Facebook or Twitter. Apparently, over the past week both sites updated their APIs, causing older plugins (like the ones I was running) to stop working. Facebook said, “update your plugin”. I checked the FacePress website and was informed that the plugin hadn’t been updated in three years. Greeeeeeeat. After an hour on Google I found that Jetpack for Facebook offers the same functionality — I just didn’t know it because I’ve been running an older version of Jetpack. After upgrading it, I was able to link robohara.com with Facebook once again.
I had to do the same thing with Twitter. WordTwit had to be upgraded and new security keys had to be generated. After going all of that, I realized that Jetpack handles Twitter connections as well as Facebook connections, so after doing all the work to get WordTwit to work again I uninstalled it and added Twitter to Jetpack as well. Sheesh.
So, two years seems to be the going time range. I don’t know why TweetDeck, Facebook, and Twitter all decided to change their configurations and break everything on the same day, but they did. Two years ago they did the same thing, and I suspect two years from now, they’ll do it again. Tune in during 2015 for WordPress/Facebook/Twitter, Round 5.
This is one of the reasons I just crosspost stuff manually. Anymore, I write my daily promo posts for thelogbook simultaneously on Twitter and Facebook, with the freedom to make the FB version longer than the Twitter version if it’s called for. My output isn’t so heavy that I can’t stop for a couple of minutes and do that every day.
On every change it gets harder (or ‘more secure’) to get data into or out of those services. I want to integrate twitter/google+ on my homepage but twitter rss feeds broke with the last api changes and I don’t have time at the moment to program a replacement.