Mailing lists and social networking

A few days ago, in my random wandering of the Internet, I came up to a post on Indies Unlimited about blog sharing. I threw my two cents in, but I don't write that much about getting published, so I figured I wouldn't get a lot of posts.

It wasn't until I saw other people's responses (not to me) that I realized I don't really have a way for people to “follow” me. More importantly, the ways I did have, I didn't actually post on my website for anyone to follow me.

RSS/Atom Feeds

My preferred method of paying attention to any website (including authors and comics) is a RSS feed. I use NewsBlur for the bulk of my reading because it is a small developer, it replaced Google Reader nicely, and has most of the features I want.

Naturally, this is the one that I had set up from the beginning. I did break it into multiple feeds, so anyone who just wants to see my writing or programming posts can do so. Or look at everything.

I haven't quite created feeds for every tag (so you could follow only Sand and Blood posts for example). I will, eventually, or if someone asks.

Mailing Lists

Well, mailing lists is kind of a stretch, but I don't care for MailChimp. I do, however, use Google Groups for a couple of categories. It does the important part, sends emails, but doesn't quite have the social and Big Brother views. For some reason, I don't like when the link from a mass-mailing doesn't show the actual link; Google Groups doesn't mess with the links.

  • dmoonfire-announce (read only, writing announcements only, very low traffic since I don't write that much)
  • dmoonfire-blog (read only, all blog posts)
  • dmoonfire (read/write, has all blog posts but you can respond and chat)

Twitter

The other social network I use is Twitter. This happens to be my favorite one to use at the moment, mainly because it fits the way I think and interact. There are some Twitter-clones I'll use eventually, but they aren't there yet.

  • @dmoonfire (random saying, conversations, and a link to all blog posts)

Facebook

I don't use Facebook a lot, but I do have a fan site. It should be set up to automatically mirror any blog posts about writing to it.

LiveJournal

I know that LiveJournal appears to be dead for most people, I still maintain a mirror of it. I think it is for a single person, but I just don't have the heart to shut it down yet.

Google+

I just added this yesterday because I found a way of mirroring things from my blog. If you can't guess, I prefer to have cross-posters for the bulk of the writing but respond individually on each network. Google+ has always been a messy thing, mainly because of the cross-posting, but I think I found a way.

Diaspora

I love the idea of Diaspora, but sadly it really doesn't have the market share for social networking. Not to mention, no cross-posting that I can set up which means I have to manually enter stuff… which means I don't always do it.

Everywhere

I love to answer questions and chat. It doesn't happen much, but regardless of the network, I love feedback, interaction, and just connecting. I think it is one of the important parts of being a fan and a creator.

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