Nutt.net Posts

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.