The lines between a personal blog and a Facebook profile seem to be getting more and more blurred daily. Facebook allows for posting, photos, great quality videos (better quality than YouTube High Quality at this point, at least for sound – though widescreen isn’t supported), games, updates, extensive customizable profiles, networking functions, subscriptions, notes and absolutely anything imaginable through easily added third-party applications and add-ons. All of this is augmented by a guaranteed group of “followers” or “subscribers” by way of one’s friends. Most people I know have over 300 friends. This is a substantial core audience that will see your posts and updates through their feeds daily. Although most friends won’t necessarily be active readers and commenters of your material, this is still a very substantial group of people for a part-time blogger. The big question is: how does a personal blog with its own domain fit into all of this? This post will explore the ways in which a personal blog can be networked with the most popular social networks today, so that readership and commenting are increased, and networking options are improved.  It will also investigate the ways in which a personal blog on its own domain can be used to fill in the potential gaps the Facebook has at the current time.

1) Public versus private

This is the place where a private blog can shine.  At this point , Facebook requires user registration.  Although a user can make their profile more or less public, it will still require a Facebook account for people to access it.  A blog, on the other hand, can be completely public.  This can be exploited by opening up content and comments to the public.  In WordPress, this is done in the Dashboard’s Discussion Settings.  In the example below, Pingbacks and Trackbacks are allowed to encourage blog networking (your blog will be notified if someone links to it). In addition, users need not be registered to comment, nor must they provide name and email, and their comments won’t be auto-deleted after a specific time. In addition, one can get rid of all moderation, but if this is done, then another anti-spam feature must be enabled.  I’ll be looking at moderation settings and anti-spam features in Section 2.

Making a WordPress blog as open and public as possible through Discussion Settings

2) Further facilitating posting: removing Captcha tests and anti-spam moderation

If you remove Captcha test (where users need to enter a random string of letters or answer a question) and if you remove comment moderation, then users will get immediate gratification in seeing their comment appear on your post.  BUT, if you do this, you must install another commenting moderator. For WordPress, the two leading ones are Askimet and WP-Spamfree.  I prefer WP-Spamfree because I feel like it removes me completely from the Spam that I would otherwise receive (Askimet has a tendency to tell me what it has blocked – which may be able to be disabled – I dunno).  The advantage of Askimet, is that it is included with the WordPress package, and it’s a breeze to use. Either one is great, and will allow you to remove all other moderation and throttling that will bug and inconvenience your users.  I’ve written more about WP-Spamfree here.

Removing moderation from Discussion Setting in WordPress, excessive links still throttled

3) Using Intense Debate to integrate your comments with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks

You can install the Intense Debate plugin to your WordPress blog.  This will replace your usual commenting template with Intense Debate’s interactive comment template.  For an example of Intense Debate, you can check the comments at the end of this post.  In order to integrate Intense Debate to Facebook, you’ll need to set up an application in Facebook and get the API and secret key. The documentation for Intense Debate tells you how to do this. At this time, Facebook integration allows users to comment from their Facebook accounts, but it doesn’t post to Wall yet.  I’ll be looking into further integrating blog posts with Facebook in the next section.

4) Using your blog’s RSS feed to post to Facebook

Facebook has a built-in RSS feed option for any blog. However, this feed will be attached to your notes, and lacks sufficient settings. Another interesting plugin WP-Book. I really love this plugin, because it will import your WordPress posts and comments into Facebook, where people can comment directly. However, it requires that users add your application to their profiles.  The advantage of RSS feeds is that anyone can read your posts and respond to them from your blog.  In addition, your new posts to your blog will show on your Wall.  After checking several Facebook RSS readers, I found a favorite through Social RSS. It has great settings and options and supports Tabs (this is rare).  The ideal world would be, if one could send blog posts to the Facebook Wall, and comments from the Wall could be sent back to WordPress. I think that Intense Debate and WP-Book come closest to this goal, but it doesn’t seem like either has fully implemented it yet.  It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if this were to be possible within this year.

Social RSS profile box

Social RSS Tab