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December 21, 2009

Post to MySpace from Wordpress

Warning: nerd talk ahead.

UPDATE: nuts, MySpace has discontinued the “Post To MySpace” feature in favor of their dumb “activity streams,” so this plug-in doesn’t work anymore. FRAK. Check back later to see if I’ve coded up a solution.

If you use Wordpress and are looking for a way to publish your WP content to your MySpace account, I’ve written a dead simple plugin that makes it pretty easy. Read on for the gory details. Otherwise, just back away nice and slow-like. Or watch the nice video in the post below this one.

(And yes, I know MySpace totally sucks and is still totally ugly and why are we still supporting MySpace anyway and they’re owned by Satan’s News Corp. and urf hurf a durf.)

Some backstory:

Until recently, the best way to cross-post items from Wordpress into MySpace was to use Roderick Russell’s MySpace Crossposter plugin. Nice work sword-swallower guy! Anyway, as evidenced by the long string of complaints and pleas in the comments over there, Roderick’s plugin stopped working as MySpace “redesigned.”

I thought I’d be a hero and figure out why the plugin stopped working. But after spending a day untangling the code and the MySpace login process, I was getting nowhere. MySpace is crazy-making, hardened against automated access via scripts, usually involves a CAPTCHA, and most of my attempts ended up here anyway because MySpace requires JavaScript.

But then I did some digging and found that MySpace has an open endpoint for people to re-post any web content to their MySpace account as a blog, bulletin or link item. Perfect! Forget automation, how about we just make it easier than cutting-and-pasting.

So I made a plugin that packages up a Wordpress post and ships it off to MySpace with a single button:

post-to-myspace

There’s no automatic publishing; you still have to log in at least once. But there’s something really elegant about the workflow. You get a nice preview, so there’s no worrying about your formatting getting mangled in transit:

post-to-myspace-2

The plugin itself is very brief and hardly rocket surgery, but if you’re into hacking Wordpress it’s a good example of how to create your own “meta box” menus to the posting/editing pages. Feel free to hack away.

Installation

Download the plugin here
Unzip it and toss the post-to-myspace.php file into your /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ directory
Log into Wordpress, go to Plugins > Installed, find the “Post To MySpace” plugin in the list and activate it.

Notes

Not yet tested in WP 2.9
Posts must be published before they can be cross-posted to MySpace.
Scheduled posts will not be automatically cross-posted. You have to click the button after they “go live.”
No warranties or fitness for a particular purpose implied. Support requests will be met with quiet, sympathetic looks. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

6 Comments

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And Steve Rydz did speak thusly:

Thank you Scott, I’ve been looking for something like this for so long. I tried the cross-poster plugin but it never seemed to work for me.

I gave up with MySpace in the end but it would be nice to be able to post there without too much hassle.
And Brad did speak thusly:

Thanks also from here. I’ll give this a try in the next week or two.
And scottandrew did speak thusly:

Thanks guys, let me know how it goes.
And peter m. did speak thusly:

OMG, you are the best human in the history of the universe for even thinking of this, let alone handing it out like candy. I will beta for you tonight.
And Crushing Krisis › Tuesday Tech Links did speak thusly:

[...] Indie acousta-rocker Scott Andrew got tired of trying to sync his blog to MySpace, so he wrote an app for that. [...]
And Scott Andrew - DIY acoustic pop superhero! - Post to iLike from Wordpress did speak thusly:

[...] the plugin I made for MySpace, this plugin will send your WP content to iLike automatically once it’s published. So you [...]