Crossposting With Blog Server Plugins
October 2nd, 2007From time to time MarsEdit users ask whether there is or will be any support in the application for “automatic crossposting.” While MarsEdit is great for managing multiple blogs from a single interface, it still requires you to manually open separate windows and “send” the post to each of the blogs you want to publish it on. Some users would like to be able to define a “metablog” in MarsEdit and have posts to that destination simulcast to multiple blogs.
I’m hesitant to change the MarsEdit interface to support crossposting more automatically, because I think it would be to the detriment of users who use it for more conventional purposes. But future development plans might make it possible to support crossposting as a “scripted action” that runs whenever you publish to a particular blog.
In the mean time, a great solution is to rig something up on your weblog server. In particular, I know of one plugin for WordPress that automates the process of crossposting from WordPress to LiveJournal. For more details about how this works, see the recent entry from Tycho about his use of the plugin in conjuction with a WordPress blog and LiveJournal.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:23 am
Is there something that precludes scripting the cross post? It seems to me having something in the script menu (perhaps the Fast Scripts ;) menu would be the way to go, then with a menu shortcut you could post to your ‘meta-blog’ it might be easier to simplify the applescript api for doing cross-posting types of tasks
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:25 am
Sam: Currently you can’t script a post all the way through to published. You can only populate a post editor window so it’s ready for the user to hit “send.” But yeah, it’s probably worth trying to make the whole thing scriptable and that would solve a lot of these types of problems (or at least be great infrastructure for solving it in a script-like way on behalf of the user).
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:03 pm
and you might plug your other app at the same time as a GREAT way to manage all this crazy scripting goodness ;)
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:30 am
the other issue that this solves, which took me some time to figure out, is that it lets–hopefully–your server deal with all the text processing issues. So my WP install uses PHP Markdown Extra, and it sends it to LJ as XHTML, not as Markdown… That’s worthwhile :)