I guess I’m going to be complaining again!
After problems with Jetpack’s “publicize” module, I switched to a plugin I had used before in order to manage my Facebook posts. The latter had always been inelegant and imperfect, but at least it worked. Unfortunately, it has some problems of its own, still.
Normally, the way I write each post is by putting in a teaser/header line of a sentence or three, then the “read more” tag. Ideally, what would get posted to Facebook would be that teaser. Instead, all plugins I’ve tried just grab the first so many words of the entire post and use that. So I thought, what if I take the text I want to appear in the Facebook link and put that in the box where you describe the message format for the post?
It turns out this is a very bad idea. What it ends up doing is removing the teaser text from original post, and doesn’t put up a teaser in the Facebook post at all, so it’s actually worse than merely not working. At this point it’s evident that if I want this plugin to work coherently, I’ll have to edit it myself. This shouldn’t be too difficult, it’s just obnoxious that there’s no plugin that seems to work correctly for this purpose.
The featured images are still broken, too. That is, the method I use to set them still requires an extra step for unclear reasons. It’s strange, because I don’t think my requirements for this blog are at all outlandish. How do people running far more demanding, feature-intensive blogs manage it? Do they just write their own plugins? I suppose some of them do. I don’t, because I’m just not interested in doing so. There are times when I want to write code, but messing with WordPress plugins is not something I feel like doing. I wrote a plugin once (it was to support BBCode in WP posts), and that was enough for me.
We’ll see if I get a chance to fix the plugin sometime this week. I hate the way my posts are coming across on Facebook at this point. Of course, I never did get around to having them linked on Twitter or anything. I suppose I should, or maybe it doesn’t matter at this point.
No idea what I’ll be writing about this week, so that’s sure to be exciting. Have a good one!
