As I mentioned in my "welcome back" message, the major purpose of this site is to serve as a foundation for tools that I write for myself that help me manage my online and offline life.

As friends of mine know, I'm fairly active on Facebook sharing links and participating in that environment. On the flip side, my Twitter account was been effectively abandoned until I started revitalizing my online presence.

The first tool that I had always planned on building for myself was a merged posting interface that would allow me to post to both networks simultaneously from a single location. A ton of what I post on Facebook works well on Twitter, so this was a low-hanging fruit to pick.

Social Poster user interface

A couple of hours of Python programming with a good amount of SDK and API reading has produced a humble form that includes a handful of fields: a text area for the message, an input for an optional URL, and checkboxes to select whether the post should go to Twitter, Facebook, or both. When submitted, the site sends the post to the selected sites.

This is a very basic tool, but one that will help me improve my online presence significantly as I can now include Twitter in my daily link posts with no additional effort on my part. It's not flashy, but it's certainly useful.

Once I have been using this tool for a while and I'm think that it's time to extend it, I'll be looking into including other social networks like LinkedIn and possibly incorporating a feature that will fetch the provided URL, fetch its contents and produce a preview of the URL if the appropriate metadata tags are available.

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