Going to post this basically as a note to myself because it’s hit me way too many times. You can’t use the after_plugins hook in…
Nutt.net Posts
I’ve been tweaking this site over the past few days, and one of my thoughts was to put my latest tweet in the sidebar. It’s…
Last weekend I spent some time updating a web application I wrote so that data is passed between server and client with JSON instead of…
Time for some much needed updates on my site. It was just a mess and needed to be cleaned up.
A couple days ago I ran a report over at GTMetrix and the screenshot looked terrible. No CSS was loading. Sure enough, when I went to the site it looked just as bad to me.
The site that I talk about in this post never gained any traction and I lost interest. The domain expires in a few weeks and…
This morning I needed a quick way to have the permalink for a WordPress post as part of the text. Sure, there’s already the get_permalink()method,…
For a site I’m working on I needed a way to hide the post title, but only on specific posts. This particular post was a…
I use VirtualBox for testing a couple of web applications. But I found myself using the same image for two different projects, but switching the…
A few months ago I needed a way to cross post from a WordPress blog to a Pinterest board. Yes, there are plugins that claim to do this. But the few free ones that I tried never actually posted, and I didn’t want to spend money on a paid plugin that might not work. So I came up with my own solution.
One note though. This isn’t a WordPress plugin, although I may write one eventually. This is a script that runs from a cron job on your server. You can setup cron jobs through control panels like cPanel or directly from the command line. Either way, most people will find it a bit more complicated than just activating a plugin.
I ended up spinning this into a normal WordPress plugin that will automatically create pins when a post is published. If you’re interested you can find the Pinterest Auto Post plugin at Reliti.com.
What we’re building
The idea is that I didn’t really care that new posts were immediately posted to Pinterest as long as they got there relatively quickly and I didn’t have to do it manually.
It’s also important that posts only go to Pinterest once, so there needs to be a way to keep track of what’s already been posted.
What I ended up with is a script that runs every 30 minutes through a cron job, although you could change the timing to whatever you want. It pulls the most recent published post from WordPress and posts the link to a Pinterest board.
One caveat. Since Pinterest is visual and requires images, this script skips any posts that don’t have a featured image.
With that, let’s get it actually working.