Blog Pipeline

How to ensure every blog post reaches all major publishing platforms and social networks? I started blogging nearly ten years ago. During those years, I have gone from WordPress to Blogger to Tumblr, and considered moving to Medium or back to WordPress, but decide to settle with Tumblr for now. In terms of total control, nothing beats WordPress, but since I have not yet decided which cloud provider to settle with for my development (Bizspark benefit for Windows Azure expiring soon), I figured it is best to keep blog hosted on separate server. However, there is another question: Will Tumblr keep upto expectation?

Everytime I migrate from one service to another, there is a considerable amount of work that follows, such as formatting lost on texts, broken images, to name a few. So here is my solution. Trying not to go into details, hope this diagram above should explain the logic. First, I decided that all contents will be created through either Instagram (I used to have IF recipe setup to Instagram, but I figured it is better to decide with one click option whenever I post a photo on Instagram app) or Tumblr depending on the length of the post. Afterwards, the automation services Ifttt and Zapier kick in to take care of replication process. Whenever Tumblr post is created, Ifttt will duplicate posts to Wordpress, Blogger (though unlikely that this will again become my main blog), Medium and Sina Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter). Through buffer, the blog post is shared on Facebook page, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. It is also worth to mention Buffer’s integration of Bitly enables conversion of blog post url into short url of your own, which for my case is hoon.io. Lastly, with Tumblr API, I also embedded a better looking version of blog index, rendered with React, and setup another Zapier to save records in Trello and Google Calendar. You can setup upto 5 zaps with 2 steps max under free plan, so this should take up 3 out of available quota.

So that is it. I used to have so many IF recipes and zaps set up, all intermingled that I post something, and end up with 5 automated tweets. With this diagram, which reminds me of one-way data binding, it looks much more organized and simplified. This should help me keep up with consistent blogging discipline.