Make Is Out, Buffer Is In
Site Dev: Make Is Out, Buffer Is In
Well, our Make.com publishing setup managed to blow through its monthly credits in about a week.
It worked.
But not well enough to convince me it was worth another $16 a month.
So... we killed it.
We Already Had Buffer...
Buffer was already part of the process because I was using it to push posts to X, and it turns out it can handle Facebook just fine too.
More importantly, its free plan gives me plenty of room for what I'm actually doing.
That got me thinking...
Why have Make sitting in the middle at all?
So I took a little break from dungeon development and made some changes to the website instead.
Publish Means Publish Now
The site now handles the publishing workflow directly.
When I publish a blog post, it immediately pushes the social posts through Buffer to Facebook and X.
No RSS feed sitting around waiting to be checked.
No Make automation waking up once an hour, noticing something changed, and eventually deciding it should probably do something about it.
Hit publish.
Post goes out.
Much better.
And While I Was in There...
Of course, once I started changing things, I couldn't just replace the existing workflow and leave it alone.
One occasional problem with the old setup was X rejecting a post because the text was too long.
That's handled now too.
The site knows what it's sending and makes sure the X version fits before handing it off, so I shouldn't have posts quietly dying because I went a little over the character limit.
I also made a handful of other behind-the-scenes improvements to clean up the overall publishing flow while I was in there.
Two Birds, One Stone
So we got rid of a service that was burning through its free allowance, avoided adding another monthly subscription, removed the hour-long publishing delay, fixed the X character-limit problem, and simplified the whole process.
Not a bad little detour.
Now when I finish writing one of these updates, I can publish it once and let the site take care of the rest.
Which means I can get back to spending my time on more important things.
Like generating hundreds of dungeon maps.