Cross Posting To Drupal Is Easy
The ability to cross post from other publishing platforms is one of the hidden killer features in Drupal. I say that this feature is hidden because I rarely ever hear anyone discussing it in the Drupal forums. The feature is activated by a core module called Blog API.
Once activated, the Blog API module allows you to publish content from other sites to your blog on Drupal. The other site must support this type of cross posting in order for the process to work properly. The benefit in utilizing this feature is that you save time by not having to publish something twice.
I use three sites on a regular basis that support cross posting as follows:
- Blip.tv - is a free video hosting website with one of the best embeddable players you can find. You can cross post any of your own videos to Drupal.
- Flickr - is the most popular photo (and more recently video) hosting site on the web. You can cross post your own photos as well as the photos of others who have set permissions appropriately.
- Utterz - is a multimedia hosting site that allows you to publish video, audio, text and photo posts.Utterz allows you to cross post any of your own posts to a Drupal site.
There are only a couple of items of information that you need to provide to set this up on any site that supports cross posting.
- You'll need to enter your username and password for the Drupal site.
- You will need to enter the "end point" or address of the interface file. This address will always be www.yoursite.com/xmlrpc.php.
- You may be offered a choice of blogging system to select when setting this up. Utterz and Blip.tv have specific choices for Drupal. Other sites may reference the MetaWeblog API or Blogger API. Either of those choices will do.
Cross posting is especially helpful for publishing rich media to Drupal. Drupal isn't really cut out to be an audio or video repository. By using some of these other sites as the source for your media you get the benefit of their storage and bandwidth capabilities while enjoying the publishing and social benefits of a Drupal-powered website.
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I've been loving this aspect of Drupal, although Wordpress also has this standard, I think.
The only problem I'm having now is that Blip.tv can't convert my Samsung Omnia videos to flash, someone there says its because my video encoder is not supported. I came across this page trying to find another video site that can cross post, so if anyone reading this knows, get in touch with me via my site, k?
:)
Some websites have a problem converting certain videos to Flash. I've had problems with my Samsung video recorder and Flickr. I think that the first order of business is finding a service that will convert your videos to flash with reasonably good quality. The service that works for you may or may not cross post. In that case you would have to cut the embed code and paste into a node that you create directly on your Drupal site.
I know that Utterli (http://www.utterli.com) cross posts to Drupal and converts uploaded videos to flash. So you may want to check that service out.
Thanks for the information on the blog API module. It's helping me out immensely.
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