Turning off wordbooker

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Yesterday, I turned off the wordbooker plugin from this blog. This was a good plugin, the work of a dedicated engineer, and one of the few projects I donated money to. The author recently expressed frustration with the project and I understand him, Wordbooker works in the interface between two large systems: WordPress and Facebook, with their own changing APIs and policies. The result was that despite his best efforts, the system was frequently broken.

For me this highlights the problems with “platforms” that change APIs and policies with each moon phase. Agile development and experimenting is a good a thing, but once your systems pretends to be an ecosystem, you need to give developers a stable API to code against: their core objective is to build interesting things, not chasing an ever-changing API.

As for functionality, I realised the important thing for me is to automatically push new posts to Facebook. Facebook broke the RSS import feature a long time ago, so I need some kind of glue to doe the pushes, ifttt.com provides this – I was already using it to push to twitter. As for moving comments from one system to the other, I realised this was not such a good feature. Conversations on Facebook are private and authentified, they are not on the blog, synchronizing the two feeds does not make much sense.

A any rate, many thanks to Steve Atty for his great work on wordbooker.

4 thoughts on “Turning off wordbooker

  1. Same problem for some of my customers with the frequent web browser updates (and I mean Internet Explorer, not Firefox!): their internal web applications can’t follow quickly enough, editors are slow to react (small ones like behemoths like SAP), so they take ages to update their browser or their OS. I have no good solution…

  2. I’ve switched off Wordbooker as well for a while. I used to publish on FB and Twitter using the buttons on the post itself, but I eventually switched to the plugin Social, which is not entirely satisfactory, but workable.

    And I second your thanks to Steve: Wordbooker was a nice project.

  3. The solution can be found in any Amiga programmer’s reference manual, specifically the chapter on exec.library, section on libraries. Or, in Microsoft COM references, particularly those section(s) talking about IUnknown.

    This has been a solved problem at least since the mid-70s. All Facebook needs to do is give a damn.

    (btw, this pure-js text-box is not mobile friendly at all.)

  4. Most of the APIs in the 80s were well documented and stable, Amiga, X11, Inside Macintosh, the Next Step API survived until today…

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