Automatic Updates to Social Media

Question

EE has been a great tool for my work, however there is one very perplexing problem that I wish I could solve. I'm hoping someone might point me in the right direction. I'm trying to implement a method that will automatically update Twitter & Facebook (+others) when I add a new entry with something like {title} {url}.

I'm looking to post a lot of photos to my site, so I want to direct people back to my site instead of using something like Twitpic or Instagram. A lot of this will be done from my phone while traveling. And this would be very similar to creating a Twitpic / Instagram type system using EE.

Here is what I had in mind and I'll explain the issues I've encountered.

1. A DSLR camera photo is sent to my Blackberry phone using Bluetooth and that image is sent via email to EE via Moblog

2. Moblog uploads the image and creates a new Entry. All of this works fine so far.

3. I wanted to use Solspace Shortcut to create a short link, however Moblog only supports text area fields, so this didn't work.

4. To update Twitter & Facebook, regarding the new entry, I can use email (for Twitter I use Tweetymail and Facebook uses their secret email address). I thought about using MX Notify to send an email whenever an entry in the Photo channel is made. The problem is that for Facebook the update needs to be the email subject, the email body is ignored, and MX Notify doesn't support dynamic content in the subject line. It would work brilliantly if it did because then you could just put {title} {shortcut-url} in and it would update Twitter and Facebook every time a post was entered.

5. I've attempted to get around the Moblog / Solspace Shortcut issue by wrapping the {exp:shortcut:url} around the long EE URL, but the parse order doesn't work so it doesn't send a link.

6. I also use CE Image to handle the image manipulation and uploading to Amazon S3 / Cloudfront.

I've also looked at a number of the social media modules (NSM Twitter, TweetLink and Social Update) and though they say "automatically" that is not the case. They are simply another field that needs text entered and then that is pushed to Twitter. This won't work with Moblog, though there is a possibility that they could (I'm not a programmer, unfortunately).

To summarize the problems, Moblog doesn't support any other fields other than text area and MX Notify doesn't support dynamic content in the subject line and all of the social media add-ons don't do things automatically.

As I mentioned, the goal is to simply send a picture to EE, have it create the entry and then send off the {title} and {url} to Twitter and Facebook. It seems simple, but I haven't figured out how to do this yet, and I've tried a lot of things.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Did you consider using Postmaster in place of MX Notify? I belive it supports variables in subject.

Answer 2

For those who may not wish to spend $65 on Postmaster, you would probably be able to achieve this for free by generating an RSS feed of your entries, and then using something like Zapier (or ITTT) to push to Facebook and Twitter every time there's a new entry published. Just a thought.