The automatic posting of the first post via IFTTT went well, more or less. There were several problems but nothing significant. For now, I automatically repost from Medium to LinkedIn, Telegram, Twitter and Friendica. I set up reading Medium’s RSS via IFTTT and then posted its content to the socials.
The first problem was that Medium banned IFTTT’s RSS crawler because of too many requests made by it. More likely, many people set up reading Medium’s RSS feeds by IFTTT, and Medium automatically restricts it.
It was easily fixed by using Google Feedburner. I added the blog RSS there and then specified Feedburner’s RSS address to IFTTT. Google’s service is the most popular, so it’s no wonder that there are no problems with it in this.
Then I noticed that there is an additional ellipsis after the URL on LinkedIn. Since the first post was over 3000 characters, with is the LinkedIn limit for regular updates, I set up a trimming of the text, adding an ellipsis after the last word that is under the limit and then adding the UR
... show moreThe automatic posting of the first post via IFTTT went well, more or less. There were several problems but nothing significant. For now, I automatically repost from Medium to LinkedIn, Telegram, Twitter and Friendica. I set up reading Medium’s RSS via IFTTT and then posted its content to the socials.
The first problem was that Medium banned IFTTT’s RSS crawler because of too many requests made by it. More likely, many people set up reading Medium’s RSS feeds by IFTTT, and Medium automatically restricts it.
It was easily fixed by using Google Feedburner. I added the blog RSS there and then specified Feedburner’s RSS address to IFTTT. Google’s service is the most popular, so it’s no wonder that there are no problems with it in this.
Then I noticed that there is an additional ellipsis after the URL on LinkedIn. Since the first post was over 3000 characters, with is the LinkedIn limit for regular updates, I set up a trimming of the text, adding an ellipsis after the last word that is under the limit and then adding the URL to the post after that.
More likely, LinkedIn trimmed the URL and added an ellipsis after it. It’s strange, considering LinkedIn uses a URL shortener and doesn’t include the original URL in the post. Or maybe there were exactly 3000 characters, and when I added an empty line after the URL, the text became over the limit.
Good thing that the URL in RSS included an additional query string with information that it’s the URL from the RSS feed. And trimming it isn’t affected functionality. I’ll keep an eye on it in the future. Maybe there necessary to take into account the ellipsis added by me and the empty line. Also, perhaps I should consider that the URL is shortened automatically, and I can use more text, but this is less likely since there was added ellipsis for some reason, and the URL might be trimmed.
Yes, another thing that I noticed was the query string in the URL was unnecessary for the functionality, so I added trimming that now in social media will be URL to the post without additional data in the query string. It’s essential with Telegram, where is no URL shortening, but Telegem’s limit of 4096 is pretty big.
Also, there is an empty image at the end of each post in Medium’s RSS for tracking purposes. Such things didn’t look nice in Telegram, where it became a media link. So I also added the removal of everything after the “<img” text in the last paragraph of the post that IFTTT reposts. In the future, I should consider using images inside the blog, but I’m not sure how they will look after reposting to social networks.
With Twitter, the problem was that I initially copied this automation code from the automation of news reposting in my project bigcats.org.ua. There I don’t have the functionality of reposting from Twitter to other socials. But I repost these blog posts to my personal Twitter, where I also have automation to repost tweets to other socials. And I use a workaround of adding a zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ) character to prevent the reposting of automated posts. So I just added adding of ZWNJ to the tweets containing links to posts in this blog.
And with a decentralized personal network, Friendica remains a problem because my instance is broken. I see that webhook was received with the post, and it’s in a queue for publishing, but there is some error, and more than 500 posts can’t be published. I should update my instance of Frinedica since it’s already without updates for two years, and I need to fix the problem, but I don’t have the resources and desire to do that now. When current social networks are destroyed by their owners, it would be time to maintain your instance of decentralized social media.
Yeah, it looks like many problems, but they are tiny ones and were resolved in minutes, except the last one, which isn’t new and unrelated to this automation.
