Trying a little experiment

Posted by Kirby Turner on December 30, 2016

I want an easy way to share certain posts to social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, at the time I publish the post. The more I can automate, the better. The problem is this site is a static HTML site generated by Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages.

So how do I automatically share a post to Facebook or Twitter? That’s what I’m experimenting with right now, and this post is my test post.

What’s Going On

For the techies reading this, here’s what I’m doing.

First, I updated my tags plugin to generate an RSS feed file for each tag. Next, I setup IFTTT to monitor the feed files for the tags “facebook” and “twitter”. When IFTTT detects a new feed file item (i.e., a new blog post), it will post the item to the appropriate social media site. If I want to share a post to Facebook, I simply tag it with “facebook”. And if I want to share the post on Twitter, I tag it with “twitter”.

The source code for this site is available on Github for those who want to look under the hood.

Now to start work on the hard part…writing more blog posts.


Posted in personal. Tagged in facebook, twitter.