Tech Note: Auto-Posting LGF Pages to Twitter with LGF Connect
We have a brand new feature tonight in LGF Pages, something I mentioned as “coming soon” in the previous Tech Note: auto-posting to Twitter, by linking your LGF account to your Twitter account.
Background: one of the groovy things you can do with Twitter is to give third party “apps” access to your account, so they can post updates, see your list of followers, and do other stuff, all without ever having to reveal your password. And if you don’t like what a third party app does with this permission, you can easily revoke its access to your account.
Now LGF Pages takes advantage of this capability, to let you automatically post a tweet whenever you post a new LGF Page.
Enabling this new feature is simple: go to your LGF Account Settings, where you will observe a new section with a button labeled “Connect to Twitter.” Click that bad boy and Twitter will open in a pop-up window, where you can grant our Twitter application (called “LGF Connect”) access to your Twitter account.
(Important note: as mentioned above, you can revoke access for LGF Connect at any time in your Twitter settings; go to the Applications tab and click the “Revoke Access” button for LGF Connect, and it’s done. There’s also an option to “Disconnect” in your LGF account settings, but this does not revoke privileges, it just deletes our access codes. Only Twitter can revoke the access privileges; there’s no way to do that with their API.)
After you authorize LGF Connect to post to Twitter, you’ll see a couple of new options in the LGF Pages posting form — a checkbox that lets you determine whether or not auto-tweet happens, and an input field for any Twitter hashtags you feel like adding.
It’s all automatic from there; the URL of your LGF Page is automatically shortened using our lgf.bz shortener, and the title of the Page becomes the text of the tweet. You should be mindful of your title’s length — the auto-tweet code truncates titles more than 100 characters to try to avoid going over Twitter’s 140-character limit.