blog.paulgueller.com

If you’re reading this, you probably have them: social networks. Del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Virb, and countless others that supposedly keep us in closer contact with those close to us. A quick Google search returns over 34 MILLION results for the phrase, and it’s the holy grail, golden hammer, or panacea depending on who you talk to. But once you’ve decided which to participate in, how do you update them without wasting oodles of time?

Reviewing my Recent Posts, I have tried many times to begin a posting regimen to share information about my personal life as well as topics and links for fellow web developers with limited success. I attribute it to a combination of a lack of blogging discipline (as well as time and content) and the intimidation of having to post and update to the various services that I belong to. After performing a little research, I think I may have  painless solutions to connect and cross-link them. WordPress is the blogging software this site uses. The features that drew me to it are that it is open-source (free!), has regular updates, and is fully customizable. There is a vast library of themes and plug-ins to extend the functionality of application, and here are some of the ones I am utilizing to work toward my goals:

• WordBook notifies Facebook whenever a new blog article is published. With an easy-to-integrate API, it creates a wall post with a distinctive icon to inform all my friends.
• Twitter Tools not only lists recent tweets in a sidebar widget, but also provides the option to send post headlines to Twitter.
• FlickrRss displays photos from your profile or recent items from your photostream RSS feed.
• Digsby is not just the best new multi-client chat application that monitors e-mail and social network accounts, it also lets you create customized live chat widgets that can be placed on the page with WP-Digsby
• BONUS: If you are looking for a social network aggregator check out netvibes, which features innumerable widgets and views to keep on top of all the feeds, posts and entries on your social network. It doesn’t have a WordPress plug-in that I am aware of, but it does a kick-awesome job of being the one-stop-shop for  information updates.

Addendum: WordPress 2.7 was released today, and in conjunction with the BuddyPress plugin, appears to give developers a framework to create their OWN social network tools. Facebook beware!