Dreamwidth Meta

Just a small signal-boost for those who might be interested:

One of my longtime frustrations with the social-networking ecosystem has been the cross-posting situation. Yes, it's fairly easy to set things up so that, when you post here, a link gets posted to Facebook. But the fact is, not too many people follow those links. What I really want is to be able to post here, and automatically copy the post over to there, so folks can read it directly. (I can wish that all my friends were here, but the fact is, Facebook is still the 800-pound gorilla; if it doesn't show up there, most of my friends won't see it.)

So a little while ago, I sat down with IFTTT (which has finally gotten powerful enough), and puzzled out how to do this right. This IFTTT Applet takes your Dreamwidth RSS feed as its input, and requires that you hook IFTTT up to your Facebook account. Given that, whenever you post something to Dreamwidth, it (eventually -- it takes a while) reads that post off your RSS feed, rebuilds the HTML into something that looks acceptable on Facebook (basically, it turns your post into Markdown), and posts it as a status update on Facebook, with a link back to the original DW article.

I can't promise that it's perfect -- it handles the most common HTML, but almost certainly will choke on complicated stuff. But it seems to be a pretty good compromise, and I've been using it successfully for a month or two now.

Here is the source code for the Filter at the heart of that, if anybody wants to take it in hand and enhance it for their own use. For an example of how things get translated, see this DW post and how it looks on Facebook.

Use it as appropriate, and please pass this along to anybody who might care...