This post is going to attempt to tie into my last post just a little bit.

Why do I have my own website?  Well, for one, I work on the internet everyday.  I build websites, etc, etc.  Two, I need one central place where I can keep all my online “activity”.  Websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; they come and they go.  I don’t want ALL of MY content to disappear with them.

Another point…do all of your friends use Facebook?  Sure, most of them probably do, but not all.  This is another problem for me.  I don’t want to login to 5 or 10 different websites to post a “status update”.  That is just plain ridiculous, and I have better things to do with my time; no offense to any of my friends.

My solution?  Well, ping.fm makes my life unbelievably easier.  In case you are wondering, here’s what I do…I post my “status updates” to a service like ping.fm. Then, it gets pumped out to FB, Twitter, and MySpace (yes, I still have that account active).  I also use the sidebar widgets to display my twitter and ping.fm status updates.

I post all my long-winded, discussion-type articles here.  I also have the ability to ping or twitter my blog posts as I feel at the click of a button inside of wordpress.  Currently, I don’t do this very often, but I can when/if I want to.  I can also have ping.fm post a blog post to my blog too, and if you look back through the older posts, you’ll see some examples of that in action.  But, if I’m going to sit down and type a blog post, I’ll probably do it from wordpress here and then feed it to ping.fm.  Then, ping will send it elsewhere for me.

Why do I like this setup so much?  Well, it makes it possible for me to post ONE time at ONE site and distribute my content EVERYWHERE I need it to go.  It also allows me to still be able to use a service like Twitter to it’s full capability (hash tags, replies, etc).  Other options I tried allowed me to pass a twitter feed here or there, but then if I put a hash tag in the update; that went too.  The problem? Most people on FB probably don’t know what the hell that was in there for.  Same for replies.  If I replied to someone, it would show up on my FB or elsewhere as well; which was clearly not the intention.

Of course, if ping.fm goes away, my setup will be crippled…temporarily.  Initially I won’t be able to distribute to multiple services quite as easily, but I could combine a few WP plugings to simulate the process.  The  good news would be that, I’m not really losing any meaningful content in this hypothetical situation.  Sure, I would be disappointed if my “status updates” that were posted through ping.fm were no longer available.  But, not nearly as much as if I lost all my meaningful blog posts.

My current setup allows for as few services, special plug-ins, etc to get the job done and done well.  I like that.  Simple.  Effective.

Feel free to copy it, or share your own strategies…