In the years I’ve been working with WordPress and Social Media, I’ve seen applications come and go for managing all your Social Media streams from a single dashboard. Some of these have been pretty decent applications, but I’ve not seen too many of them survive. But, so far, I’ve not seen a system that curates all your Social Media streams into a single application for the world to see. Also, I’ve not seen anything that will bring this into your WordPress website in a presentable manner.

Until RebelMouse

What Is RebelMouse

In the words of the developers themselves:

RebelMouse is your social front page; connect all of your social networks to create a beautiful, dynamic site in seconds. RebelMouse shows the world what you care about and automatically updates as you share.

Basically, the RebelMouse website allows you to pull your Facebook, Twitter, FlickR, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, and any other RSS feed that you’d like to add. Plus, if you want to add multiple accounts from a single service, you can do that as well. Finally, with Twitter, you can add stories based upon a certain hashtag so if you’d like to curate stories about a certain event to your WordPress website, just make sure you enter the hashtag for that event into RebelMouse.

OK What Can I Do With This?

Use The RebelMouse Page As Your Home Page

If your website is not WordPress, you can visit the RebelMouse website – after you set up your account – select from a few options, and then produce your embed code.

But, if you are using WordPress (you must be, you’re reading about it here), then you simply install the RebelMouse plugin from the WordPress repository.

Once you’ve installed the plugin and activated it, navigate to and you will see the box to put your RebelMouse site name. When you sign up for RebelMouse, you will choose your main site name (much like you chose your Facebook name or Twitter name). That’s the information that will go here.

Use The RebelMouse Page As Any Page On Your Website

If you click the “Page Settings” tab of the screen, you can choose either a different RebelMouse page or your main page and create a specific page on your website to display your Social Stream. You can name this page anything that you’d like.

Use The RebelMouse Widget On Your Website

You can put the RebelMouse Widget anywhere you can place widgets on your website. Simply navigate to the menu and then drag the RebelMouse Widget into any widgetized area of your WordPress theme.

There are a few settings in the widget that allow you to configure it to suit you. One that you will want to pay special attention to is the Height setting. According to the note below it:

leave empty to make RebelMouse widget autoadjustable

This setting appears to imply that the RebelMouse widget will auto-adjust to the height of the page that it is showing on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, what that setting does it auto-adjust to display more of your RebelMouse stories as you scroll down. If your page is 1200 px high and you scroll to the bottom, the footer will move down and the RebelMouse widget will “grow” to show more stories. You might be better served to set the height of the widget. Then the widget will show a vertical scroll bar that your viewer can use to scroll through your stories.

Use The RebelMouse Shortcode To Embed Your Stream

The RebelMouse stream can be embedded into any post or page on your WordPress website by simply using one of the following shortcodes:

[rebelmouse sitename="rebelmouse"]

[rebelmouse sitename="rebelmouse" h="1500" ]

As you will notice, the arguments for both of the statements echo those in the widget noted above. The first is “sitename” which is your RebelMouse sitename mentioned earlier. The second shortcode defines the height that we discussed earlier. The same warning applies here. Be sure to use the second shortcode and define your height unless you are comfortable with an ever growing website page. I could actually see uses for it when put in a page or post much more than in a sidebar widget. But, I am open to suggestions on how it would be useful to have a growing sidebar widget.

What About Page Names?

I’ve mentioned Page Names several times throughout this article. Page names will be important from the moment you sign up for your RebelMouse account. The first page name you will want to grab is your own personal profile. I was in on the first page grab when Rebel Mouse started, so I was able to get my name. However, since RebelMouse has been out for several months, you may have to use your middle initial or middle name to be able to get your personal profile.

Once you have your personal profile, then you will need to reserve names for any Facebook pages that you currently manage. For me, that included all the pages that I managed for clients. Once again, I was fortunate to be in early, so all of my clients pages have an associated RebelMouse page with a name that they like and demonstrates their company.

When I got in to RebelMouse, there was no limit on how many names you could reserve, but some unscrupulous marketers began to grab several hundred names in an evening, so the RebelMouse team has since placed limits on this. I have not seen any official number, but I’ve heard of people being limited to 30 and 50 names. You may achieve different results.

Will It Work On Multi-Site

The answer is “Yes”. However, when you install the plugin from the Network Admin Dashboard, DO NOT Network Activate it. If you do (and it is possible to do), whenever you try to enter your RebelMouse information into the settings screen and click “Save”, you’ll get the dreaded “Cheatin’ Uh” message that tells you absolutely nothing. I spent about two hours trying to troubleshoot that one issue before I coudl write this article. Finally, in a fit of desperation, I Network Deactivated it, and then went to the specific website to reactivate it. I probably should have known better, but I guess the flu I’m fighting has my head a little fuzzy. Regardless, that is one of my suggestions to the developers – note that if used in multi-site not to Network Activate.

Check out RebelMouse, set up your account, and then come back here to tell us what you think. I’m certain others would like to hear your opinion. RebelMouse has plans to roll out some paid services for both personal accounts and business accounts, but the FREE version is a really nice social stream aggregator and I intend to use it for now.

Finally, there is a RebelMouse Lite plugin in the WordPress repository, but when you consider that the full plugin can do everything that the Lite version can – and more – I can’t see a reason to use the Lite version unless you never had the intention of using any of the features of the full version. I learned a long time ago to “Never Say Never”.

Photo Credits
JAMoutinho via photopin cc