I really like WP’s automatic promotion to other platforms (I guess they’re currently calling it Jetpack Social) in theory. However, the first integration I used was with Twitter, so I came to see the Custom Message that Jetpack lets you set in the pre-post checks as the pithy tagline for the article and I really like how the result on Twitter is basically message, link, image. I’ve tried to model every other platform share after it, but the tools I’ve been able to find don’t really let me do that.
The construction I would want to use is:
CUSTOM MESSAGE (as the title if the platform has titles)
Featured Image
Link to Blog Post
(tags and categories if they’re a separate block on a given platform).
For over ten years I’ve had WordPress post to my blog’s dedicated Twitter account and then an IFTTT recipe to retweet on my personal account. It’ll be interesting to see which breaks first. WP announced they weren’t able to agree on a deal with Twitter and wouldn’t be able to continue after the start of May, but the post I made two days ago appears to be shared on Twitter.
For a long time I was running an IFTTT recipe to post to Tumblr too, but even with all the customization it gave me, I decided it was too much of a hassle to edit the results before letting them go live. A few months ago I came back to the stock Tumblr share and all the right pieces are there and then some, but they’re in the wrong order, so I’m now in the habit of jumping to Tumblr as soon as I post and rearranging the crosspost.
I’d love to also share to my Mastodon in the blast, but I think I toyed around with IFTTT and found there just wasn’t an option that didn’t include the excerpt, and there doesn’t seem to be a Masto integration that’s available without paying WP $300 a year for the Business upgrade or getting off of .com, which I don’t think I’m ready to do. It’s just a hobby project with under a hundred hits a month.
It’s been so hard to get rid of the excerpt from what Jetpack automatically blasts into cyberspace that I tried setting my custom excerpt to be just whitespace, but it recognized that as the same as leaving it blank and sent out the excerpt anyway.
I checked the RSS feed, and the custom message doesn’t seem to be included.
Is there much I can do short of rolling my own hosting and plugins?
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