Introducing Total Moon from RebelMouse

Total Moon is the combination of the Moon and moonblogsfromsyb into one place using the wonder that is RebelMouse. As you can see above it organises the content in a very funkay "tile style" and you can sign up to get a daily newsletter of all the posts. I have also created sections so you can choose to just sign up the A Bit of Culture section or Let's Get Political etc. Of course you could get just this content from a couple of feeds from the separate blogs but, as Rebel Mouse point out, not everyone is a "social media ninja"

I had been thinking about this for some time but with Totally.Dot but they stopped allowing feeds to be added to their boards some time ago and also I am unable to show my Facebook pages on a board despite Facebook being the only way to sign up. It is free, but there is meant to be a Totally.Us for brand which I presume is where they want to try and "monetise" the service, along with the "Big Data" from all of the users, but it has been "coming soon" for a while now.

I do hope it succeeds though as although it does not let you add feeds it does create feeds from any of the boards you make and this can be very handy for easily creating feeds for all the Twitter accounts or Facebook pages you would like to follow without having to login to either of them and instead just add them to Feedly etc. There are other ways to do this but, especially with Twitter it does take a bit of fiddling around with Google Scripts.

Update: This has become easier and you can get tweets and retweets from a Twitter list with a widget. See the excellent Digital Inspiration

Twitter is the best way to keep up with what "national treasure" Mr Billy Bragg is up to so here is my Billy Brag Totally.Me board from which you can get a feed and so then have his news/wisdom and stuff he likes sent anywhere with the wonder of IFTTT.com

Update: The Billy Bragg board did stop working though it has been fixed but in the meantime I did find twitrss.me which turns any Twitter account into a feed and you can include retweets.

But DO NOT use http://www.rssitfor.me as it did not work but then mysteriously started to add random feeds to to my Feedly and I had to delete my Feedly account and then create it again to fix it.

Also as long as you have a  WordPress or Tumblr blog in which each post has a good sized image it can look great on a board which you can then embed onto your site - see The Moon WordPress board

But it was a shame I could not add the original Moon feed from Blogger and also with moonblogsfromsyb smaller images get pixelated and posts without images use the image from the previous post which can look a bit odd. This led me to look for alternatives and I came across RebelMouse which was founded by former Huffington Post CTO back in 2012 but has recently been upgraded. It has a pretty strong looking paid for account called Rebel Rour and one obvious benefit of the paid for service would be to get rid of the RebelMouse branding and especially the rather unappealing mouse in the tab on your browser. However, there is a great deal you can do with a free account and it has many advantages over Totally.dot:

• It de-dupes content  - so if you have different platforms fed into the site that link to the same content it will only show the first post to appear.
• It has an option to not show posts with "no media" but if you deselect this then it does show all posts and if there is no image or if an image is too small  it does not show and it can also show a stills from videos which you can expand and play form within the site.
• You can create sections with take posts with certain hashtags or simply select another RebelMouse site page or any other website and you can make them private.
• You can add up to 25 RSS feeds with the free service but as it points out in its excellent help guides "if you need to add more you can use an RSS bundling service like ChimpFeedr."
• The aforementioned email newsletter sign up service and with the paid service you can link it up with Mailchimp.

A with Totally.dot  you can add all kinds of Twitter content as well as Facebook pages and and searches and you can also embed your RebelMouse site into your site as with Totally.dot.

Totally.dot and RebelMouse both work well as mobile sites but RebelMouse is more responsive in creating just one column of posts. With its latest latest upgrade it has become more mobile friendly and it's Android (and I presume iOS app) just looks like a wrap round of the mobile web app that works brilliantly on Windows phone.

RebelMouse also allows you to share content across multiple platforms as well as the brilliant and missed Streamified service did - which means you can share to Facebook, Twitter and Google+  personal profiles in one go, though the Google+ part generates the Google+ popup into which you need to paste your text but then that does give you a chance to then change it from whatever you are putting on Facebook.

Since Streamified was the only other service that I know that could do this was SocialBa! but this has it's limits when it comes to video and images that Sreamified didn't and RebelMouse does not. You do have to add anything you share to a RebelMouse site or section but if you are sharing privately you can simply add it to a private section. The sharing options all work via mobile as well and Android users can use it with the brilliant Feedly and Old Reader app gReader.

The one thing only SocialBa! can still only do for free is share to your Facebook profile as well as multiple Facebook pages along with Twitter and Google+. I think Rebel Rour might well give that option though.

If it linked up to Feedly and/or also became an IFTTT Channel it would then become truly "awesome".