Some have asked how posts (such as what you are reading now) are first stored on Lars Toomre's website(s) and then automatically cross-posted to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Let me briefly explain how it is done. Lars' Twitterfeed picks up (via RSS feeds) recent original content posted both to the Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") website and to Lars' personal ("LT") website. Both of these websites are running what is known as Drupal — what arguably is the most popular Content Management System ("CMS") currently in wide-spread use.

Drupal, an open-source CMS software package, dynamically creates each web page that is rendered for the human (or bot) website visitor. What content is displayed depends upon what then is in the website data bases; the various parameters that are set beforehand on a system-wide basis; and what specific URL the visitor (or bot) requests (as in at the top of a typical web browser). Drupal is truly a pretty amazing piece of collectively engineered software!!! The original content published with Drupal as a customized RSS feed is then collected by Lars' Twitterfeed and automatically fed as input to his Twitter account (@ltoomre).

If one were to log into the Twitter website, one could peruse the content that has been automatically cross-posted and then published to various external sources. One might notice that the two websites (LT and TCM) are set-up slightly differently. Whereas the TCM site will only "publish" in its RSS feed original content posted to the blog category, the LT website "publishes" in its RSS feed everything at that point in time was displayed on the front page of the LT website. As a result, the LT portion of the Twitterfeed picks up such items as "Lars personal" events like library entries, recipes and quotes as well as whatever original content Lars might publicly post. The TCM RSS feed does not currently publish such entries like a quote of the day, something that was entered in the Reference section or an event that TCM might be participating in.

This combined feed from Twitter is then available to be "consumed" by a wide variety of RSS reader applications. One of those RSS readers has been incorporated into Facebook as an application. When the parameters are correctly set (and then verified), the Facebook application periodically reads my Twitter feed and then cross-publishes new entries as new content on my Facebook account with links back to the original post. Hence, without any manual intervention, much of the original content shows up on both the TCM/LT websites as well as appearing as links on various social networking sites.

I do have one question though for the reader. Should the TCM RSS feed be modified to include a broader range of content types? Your thoughts and comments (whether public or private) are most welcome.