I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time learning how to automate social media. In 1996, I published my first webpage at Tennessee Tech, where I worked under Jeff Austen, Ph.D., in the Electrical Engineering Department. Dr. Austen attended graduate school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where the “first” practical web browser for widespread use was developed: Mosaic.
I don’t recall many details, but I suppose Dr. Austen’s connections to UIUC allowed me and some other Tech graduate students to become exposed to Mosaic. One of my first projects was to set up an HTML page that I could access from another computer across the room. While the capability was cool, I was not clairvoyant enough to see the future potential with more than 1.88 billion websites in the wild today. (Side note IMDB.com is one of the oldest websites still in existence.)
That is to say that the web I knew in 1996 is not the web that exists today. Coding and automating websites is no longer done through simple text editors like vi.
I have spent the past few months learning tools such as WordPress, Buffer, Zapier, and MailChimp to enable automation and timing of cross-platform posting. To simplify the learning curve, I’ve focused on the big three: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X as well as GoodReads and Amazon. Integrating these tools with e-commerce sites such as PayHip and ShippingEasy has kept me busy.
While I still have more work to do tonight, I have achieved a minimal viable product that allows full automation for my self-publishing hobby for The Art of the Compromise. The big question now is, what’s gonna break?