Today’s post is going to be a relatively short one, something had broke on the site and the fix was quite simple. For the longest time I used a Jetpack plugin from Automattic to share to social medias for me as I stopped routinely checking Facebook and Twitter. One day back last year (around that June time frame) I realized that these posts were not getting made consistently. After doing some digging I realized why – Automattic had monetized the once free Jetpack social plugin, now the “free plan” only allowed for 30 shares a month.
Maybe I missed the announcement and am just ranting incoherently for no reason, but … I am not paying for a service that I was using for free that the new boss decided should be making more money… profiteering gluttons. Of course, the list of alternatives was very short and disappointing since almost all were geared toward letting visitors share posts to THEIR social media instead of automatically sharing posts to YOUR social medias. In the end I landed on Social Media Auto Publish from XYZScripts.
This plugin is giving me the same publishing options I had before and for free too, with the caveat that I needed to do a little “developer” work to connect to the various social services. What I needed to do was quite simple and documented (so I will not go into the details here), however the company that produces the plugin allows an option to let them do the setup work for me for a small fee. With that the site is back up and broadcasting out to the social platforms of the world.