While I was looking for an app on Facebook that allowed the integration with Windows Live, as described by Steve Ballmer in his keynote speech at the CES in Las Vegas on 07/01/09, I found an app called "Mirror Blog". This app does exactly what it says on the tin: It mirrors your blog onto Facebook. – That’s right: All the recent articles that are featured in your blog’s RSS feed appear on Facebook in chronological order.

Seemingly a number of bloggers appear to have problems with with the app reading XML RPC and/or resolving their RSS feed’s source; but generally there appears to be no really serious problems with the app so far.

You’ll notice a "Keep" button as well as a "Remove" button; both of which appear on your own computer in the app’s GUI on your home page: This is a good and sensible precaution, for reasons that we’ll go into later. All you do is highlight the post that you want to remove and click the appropriate button.

Whilst Mirror Blog’s reproduction is good; it’s far from perfect: -

That screen-grab isn’t as good as I’d hoped. I’ll tell you that one thing Mirror Blog doesn’t do is copy the line-alignment accurately from the original blog to the Facebook copy: Everything in the copy is left-aligned.

This text is originally centre-aligned.

…And this text is originally right-aligned.

In addition to the above there’s something else of greater importance that it doesn’t copy at all: That being the output from your widgets and plugins. In a nutshell, then, it copies your blog posts only; not including anything else, with around 98% accuracy.

Now; providing that you only want to get the message "out there", and can live with the incorrect line-alignment, it’s a rather unique and amazing tool which can increase your overall readership somewhat.

- But; and here’s a major drawback, your advertising materials will only be read by the readers who actually visit your blog itself: For instance; if you use Google Adsense, none of your Adsense adverts will show. In fact the only way to show an advertisment after translation and mirroring by Mirror Blog is to hard-code it into your post without relying on any other online source. Even then there’s still a problem: Some hyperlinks included in your original post appear as plain text in the Mirror Blog version. Not everything that was originally clickable is clickable any longer;  some of it appears as dead text.

If you’re running a personal blog on a service such as Google’s Blogger, for instance, this may not be too much of a problem. However if, like myself, you’re running a monetised self-hosted WordPress blog, then this could lead to a loss in advertising revenue, among other losses.

In short the resultant post on Facebook is a poor copy of your original WordPress blog article with the functionality of WordPress removed. – Yet even this has its advantages would you believe? :

You see; I’m writing this article about Mirror Blog, and I want it to appear on Facebook so that other bloggers know what they’ll be letting themselves in for. As such; Mirror Blog is a perfect tool for the job: This article is almost devoid of hyperlinks except for the tag-links generated by WordPress; and although I intend to place a Google Adsense advertisment at the bottom – Which I trust all original blog readers will click on and make a purchase , I can live without it appearing on Facebook this time around.

This is where the "Remove" button we saw earlier comes into its own: Copy everything from your blog by updating Mirror Blog; then just remove those posts that you only want to see appearing on your blog alone. OK it’s slightly time-consuming perhaps, particularly if you post small and often as some bloggers do, but all in all it could be a very useful tool to have available in your online arsenal.

Have you used Mirror Blog? Are you considering doing so? Have you something to add to the above? Please do comment; it would be nice to hear from you.

22 March 2009 – Addendum:

Something else I noticed today is that, if you have posts queued for publication in WordPress; Mirror Blog publishes them before WordPress is scheduled to do so. That’s not good; bearing in mind that none of the related adverts etc appear on Facebook. – It’s out of order.