POSSE: WordPress.com -> Micro.blog -> Twitter

Many of my tweets start on my microblog. My microblog is hosted on WordPress.com and hooked into the Micro.blog community via its RSS syndication feed. I usually post with the Micro.blog iOS and macOS apps, though sometimes I use the WP.com apps or web interfaces. I like having options.

On my main, long-form blog (this site), my “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” (POSSE) flow uses wp.com’s Publicize feature to publish to social media.

A screenshot of WordPress.com’s Publicize admin interface showing connections to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Path.

A screenshot of the post sharing interface on WordPress.com showing connected Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts and a history of publication for each

But on my microblog, I use Micro.blog’s cross-posting bot.

A screenshot of Micro.blog’s cross-posting admin interface showing the three feeds I have configured, one of which is setup to cross-post to Twitter and Facebook. Header text reads: “These feeds should contain posts you wrote. When someone follows you, they will see posts from all of these feeds in their timeline. If you have an external blog such as WordPress, you can add that feed below.”

I tested the bot with a post containing a link, an image, and an image description. Here’s how it displayed on Micro.blog, WordPress.com, and Twitter:

Micro.blog macOS app

The POSSE link and image description are intact.

WordPress.com

rnbn.blog is the source. It captures the post in its full.

Screenshot of the blog post as displayed in Chrome on macOS

Aside: @wordpressdotcom, we really need to improve image display when full-size images are inserted (as commonly happens when posting with some interfaces). Images flowing below the fold is not a good experience. Jetpack improves gallery display, but this attention doesn’t extend to individual images.

Twitter

The link url and the image description are extracted and inlined. Nicely done. I really like that image descriptions are included, making defaulting to accessible easier.

POSSE on https://t.co/PffEuxvGC0.

The post sharing interface on https://t.co/PffEuxvGC0 showing connected Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts and a history of publication for each

https://t.co/VAdjnTYqti pic.twitter.com/vh22qx9a8O

— Ryan Boren (@rboren) March 9, 2018

Embeds

Embeds are not handled so nicely. The Facebook embed was stripped from this post when syndicated to Micro.blog and Twitter. In WordPress, embeds are inserted by pasting plain links into the editor. My expectation was that the link would be extracted from the embed and passed along to Micro.blog and to Twitter. For posts that are quotes, this can result in the link to the source being stripped.

Before I tweet, I consider directing the thought toward my microblog first. The microblog is becoming my default for less than 280 characters as well as less than a few hundred words. POSSE allows those thoughts to keep flowing to Twitter where folks in the education, tech, publishing, neurodiversity, and disability communities I inhabit hang out and create serendipity.