Well sometimes the plugins work and sometimes they don’t.  There is a very handy plugin for WordPress called ‘CR Post to Ping.fm’ that worked like a charm.  Recently however, many people have had their API codes for this particular plugin suspended.    Ping.fm has been slow to respond when you follow up with them and so there is not an easy way to get the plugin working again. So what is a person to do in it’s place?

What is nice is with this application is that it allowed the blogger to update all of their social networking sites all at once through using the ping.fm service and the ‘CR Post to Ping.fm’ plugin.  The latest news from the author of the plugin shares that Ping.fm is still evaluating his plugin in their bid to reduce spammers from abusing their service.

In the meantime, there is another plugin that uses another service called LinksAlpha.  LinksAlpha is similar to Ping.fm with some important differences.  The first one is that it updates fewer number of websites than ping.fm, and second, it has a tiered service that gives you only the barest number of social networking sites you can update for free and the barest number of times you can update those sites.

If your only wanting to connect to the major sites like Linked-in, Twitter and Facebook and you only have one blog you want to share with these networks and you post no more than once a day, then this solution will serve your needs.

  • First you need to get an account at LinksAlpha and setup your networks.
  • Then install the plugin ‘Network Publisher’ and activate it
  • Click the link that says ‘add your api key’ and you will go to a page with a long alphanumeric code
  • copy it into the box that says API key in your plugin setup
  • That’s it, you’re done!

This will keep you connected to your basic social networking accounts until you can get your ping.fm account up and running again.

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