Hooking up the wires

I spent a couple hours today trying to integrate the blog with some social media sites.  I have a Creepy Cleveland Facebook Page, but I'm not a giant fan of Facebook so I want to make it as easy as possible to put content on my wall without having to sign in and out all the time.

I also have a Twitter feed that I intend to just post blurbs to whenever there is a new post on Creepy Cleveland.

Enter Twitterfeed.  As it turns out, I had and existing account that was already hooked up to Facebook and Twitter.  I just forgot my password.  A quick click on 'I forgot my password' and I was all set (reset).  The only problem I foresee is that both feeds already have posts and tweets.  I suppose I'll continue using the interfaces the same way (a new tweet and wall post for every new blog post), but it may take a while for the old content on these sites to roll off.

I also pulled the photos from the old site and uploaded them to the Creepy Cleveland Picasa account.  I still have to go back through all the old posts and re-link the pictures, but I've already done some of them and it looks to be a pretty easy job.  I especially like the fact that I can embed a slideshow into the posts where I have multiple pictures.

On the old site(s) I had embedded a bunch of videos from Creepy Cleveland's YouTube Channel.  This time I just posted a link to the channel itself.  Why reinvent the wheel when I can manage all my videos from YouTube's interface?  (Note to self: revisit and clean up that channel...you've got friend invites from six months ago)

Once upon a time I had an idea to create a Google Map of the most discussed locations on Creepy Cleveland. After all, the most common question on the site is "Where is [haunted place]?".  I also threw together a map of the (Halloween) Haunted Houses around the Cleveland area.  This time I decided to trash that idea after finding  more dead links than live ones on the existing map.  I still like the idea of keeping track of the Halloween Haunted Houses, but I'm going to have to do it each year.  They come and go too often.

Lastly, I set up the Google Calendar for Creepy Cleveland.  So far I've only got a few Halloween Haunted House opening dates and the major Pagan Calendar Sabbats, but I envision posting things like interviews, lectures and special events that Creepy Cleveland visitors may be interested in.