I’ve been using WordPress for my weblog for quite a while now and I find the ability to extend the basic functionality to be one of its greatest strengths. The developer community is amazing to say the least. I rely on a number of plugins to publish this weblog, but none more than Shorten2Ping by Samuel Aguilera.
Shorten2Ping allows me to use the excellent ping.fm, which allows me to post updates to all of my social networks, so when I publish a new weblog post Twitter, Facebook, and a couple of other spots are automagically updated for me. No fuss, no muss… until recently.
To get Shorten2Ping to work I have to provide an API key assigned by ping.fm. This is basically a handshake that allows Shorten2Ping to communicate with ping.fm on my behalf and publish my updates. (Yes, that’s an oversimplification, but you get what I mean.) About a week, or so, ago Shorten2Ping started receiving “Your API key has been suspended. Please contact us regarding this matter.” messages from ping.fm when I’d publish a post. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, turns out I wasn’t the only person with this problem. The author of Shorten2Ping got to the bottom of it. Ping.fm had a spam problem and disabled his developer key.
“The problem is that seesmic suspended it because they say that Shorten2Ping is used by spammers users.”
What to do?
All is not lost. Samuel patched up his plugin, and with any luck it’s going to work when I publish this page. If it doesn’t I’ll publish an update to this post, but hopefully it’ll work first time out.
There are a couple of things you’ll need to do after updating Shorten2Ping, it should show up in your WordPress Updates, so go install it.
First thing you’ll need to do is visit ping.fm and copy your posting e-mail address. Once you have that you’ll need to go to Plugins, locate Shorten2Ping and click on Settings link.
Next you’ll want to select Ping.fm email from the Send Notificaiton To combo-box.
Finally click on the Notification link and paste the e-mail address you copied from ping.fm and paste it into Posting email
Once you’ve done that you should be able to post using WordPress and once again update all your favorite social networks.
UPDATE: This fix requires more than the above steps to work. Apparently you’ll need support from your web host. The new Shorten2Ping “fix” requires the php mail() function. Apparently I don’t have that support enabled, and many folks probably don’t. I’d imagine it’s a security risk. Maybe we can convince Samuel to create Shorten2DlvrIt? Dlvr.it will also publish to your social networks just like ping.fm.
11 replies on “Fixing Shorten2Ping for WordPress”
Thank you for the howto 😉
I hope it worked for you (should do if mail() php function is allowed in your host).
Samuel, I’m a bit bummed this morning. Apparently I don’t have mail support enabled. More digging necessary.
Maybe you could do Shorten2DlvrIt? Dlvr.it also pushes to multiple services.
Oh, I was afraid of that. Well, I guess I will stay posted on the developments here. I worked on this pretty hard this morning but it does not sound like everyone has gotten to the bottom of it all yet.
Works for me! Thanks!
Because I’m lazy, I’ll just refer to this post here where I mention three specific plugins to retool the mail() function. I can assure that all three work with WP3.0.X and I have just now tested the Shorten2Ping plugin as working perfectly with the ping.fm via the “secret email address” option, sent via SMTP (!) and not the always troublesome PHP mail() function.
In that same post I also mention – even though it’s geared to one hosting company, it’s generally true – that SMTP especially with SSL is highly recommendable to avoid soft-fails and message declines (or tarpitted) due to not using non-specific accounts. Set a “real” email account up on the same host as Shorten2Ping and send from it with SMTP and ping-fm will accept it perefectly.
¡Gracias don Samuel por un maravilloso plugin que nos viene de perlas!
dllvr.it doesnt need shorten2. it updates your networks through rss feeds which is way coolr than ping.fm
Since I can’t get Shorten2Ping working, no fault of Samuel’s, I’ve switched to dlvr.it. I haven’t posted anything yet, but will shortly. Let’s see how it works?
Hi Rob, i have wp-smtp-mail working on my WordPress blog, and have followed things to the letter. But don’t see any post go through to ping.fm and on to twitter.
Is there a log file to review for shorten2ping to see if the plugin is working?
And regarding dlvr.it, it uses RSS, but it does not have a plugin for WordPress
Hope you can help,
Regards,
John
John,
I think you’ll need to get in touch with Samuel Aguilera, Shorten2Ping’s author, for an answer to that.
I’m bummed ping.fm cut him off like that. I’ve been a fan of ping.fm for quite a while and loved the integration Samuel provided with Shorten2Ping.
I’m sorry your configuration isn’t working. I really am. If I could go back to Shorten2Ping tomorrow, I’d do it.
Dlvr.it is nice. One of the things I like is its use of RSS. I wish I could add more than Twitter and Facebook posting, but that’s pretty minor. As far as I know there is no plugin for WordPress.
Rob,
Dlvr.it seems best. I like it’s custom short link and stats options.
Is there any comparision chart between dlvr.it and ping.fm available over Internet? I am confused to chose which service for my wordpress powered Multisite installation
Asshu,
Dlvr.it is really nice. It uses your RSS feeds to publish to your targeted services. One downside, as far as I’m concerned, is the lack of third party URL shortening services. You get Dlvr.it, that’s it. Pretty minor.
I like ping.fm as well. I like the fact they have a nice API for publishing. They have URL shortening, or you can use your own. Something strange happened with Shorten2Ping and ping.fm revoked their key that allowed it to work.
Both services are very good at what they do.