Sep

18

3 Top Tools To Tame Twitter

Filed Under Doing, In the life, Social Media | 2 Comments

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Twittermania
Creative Commons License photo credit: Thomas Hawk

As Twitter moves into its more mature phase, a number of have emerged, some good, some not so good. I’m an early adopter and a daily user and have experimented with many over time. Please feel to follow me but without further blather, here’s my top 3, must have, :

  • TwitThis.com — Though showing its age, TwitThis is a very tool. In a nutshell, simply browse to a page that you want to share. Click the TwitThis bookmarklet (that you’ve previously installed). If you’re not logged in to , you’ll be prompted to do so.  A window pops up, and you can edit your Tweet and then send it to your stream. I like it because for quick Tweets, I don’t have to jump to another application, load a tab in my browser, etc.
  • Twitter Twerp Scan — If you care about managing your Followers, then you need to run the Twerp Scan from time to time. Basically, Twerp Scan checks your account for people with extremely high following to follower ratios. These are most likely ‘bots or marketing drones — who could be potentially bringing down the value of your ‘ Juice’ (is there such a thing? I’m thinking of Google Juice here, that mythical elixer that adds Page Rank to your website based on the power of incoming links). You can customize your Twerp ratio but if you have a high number of Twerps, the block/removal process is a bit tedious. Id’ love to see a ‘batch un-follow’.
  • TweetLater.com — Ok, you’ve used for a while, are used to updating your followers, and have a good network that notices when you’re not there. Or you’re the specialist for an organization that uses to keep your informed. Regardless, you also have a need to publish Tweets on a regular basis, then TweetLater is for you.  Simply, it’s a hand site that allows you to queue-up Tweets, to be published at a specific time.  One very and not-so-obvious feature: you can also set TweetLater up to autofollow people who follow you. Reducing your maintenance chores, though I’d remember to run TwerpScan from time to time :) Just to nuke the Twerps.

Aug

12

A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, Review, Social Media | 3 Comments


A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything (image: )

Mockups…easy!
Part of the regular cycle is the user interface mockup. I’ve worked with many different including Google Sketchup and Adobe Photoshop to build representations for clients.

But nothing has been as quick, easy, and as Balsamiq Mockup, and (and /offline) user interface mockup tool for PC, Mac and .

version is $79, but the version is , with some limitations.

I’ve done a couple of small projects for personal work using the (5 minute nag screen) version.

Mocking up
Here’s how easy it is to use:

  1. Load up the default ‘demo’ page.
  2. Press Ctrl-A to select all default elements
  3. Press Delete to remove all default elements
  4. Start selecting and dragging in elements from the element bar at the top of the page (over 60 of them)
  5. Double-click on an element to edit its properties
  6. Repeat until you’ve got a mockup you’re happy with

A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything (image: )

Yes, it’s that easy.
With the version, you’re prompted every 5 minutes with an advertisement, but you can still save your work or print it out. Ads don’t get in the way of your workflow.

Developers have chosen a , look for the presentation because:

Balsamiq Mockups intentionally uses hand-drawn UI elements, so that people don’t get attached to “that pretty color gradient” or think that your mockup has actual code behind it and is “practically done”.

A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything (image: )

This lets your focus on the functionality of the item and is generally more open to honest critique (which is what you want at the mockup stage).

Some other features of the version:

  • Export to Human-readable text
  • Import from text
  • Integrated into Confluence, with other apps in the pipe
  • Pre-drawn controls and icons
  • Very easy to use
  • :)

So, if User Interface , User , or website is your thing, you need to check out Balsamiq Mockup.
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Aug

11

Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

Filed Under Blogging, In the life, News, Social Media | 6 Comments


Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down) (image: )The world was in a tizzy this afternoon as ’s application crashed and burned.

and Apps for domains all seem impacted.

This is a breaking event so I’ll update this post when more is known. Gmail’s Blog has nothing on it, currently.

*** UPDATE ***
It looks like the big brains at Gmail have fixed the issue.

The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

And indeed it does seem to be back to normal. Excellent.

Aug

8

I love mashing technology! (freebies)

Filed Under How to, In the life, Social Media, Web | Leave a Comment


I love mashing technology! (freebies) (image: ) + LinkedIn = Cards


I’ve written before about Moo (cards & stickers) and LinkedIn (the network), but this is the first time I’ve written about both in the same post.

Short story.
is letting you make 50 of their beautiful photo-enhanced business cards for free!

It’s really mashup2
itself is a mashup of the traditional card printing , an card creation and billing model, and an ability to import from Flickr and other sources. The new mashup component is that you can import parts of your LinkedIn profile into the card creation process.

And 50 free Moo cards is always cool.

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Jul

17

Wordpress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, News, Social Media, Web | Leave a Comment


Wordpress Plugin for iPhone/iPod touch
Creative Commons License photo credit: purplelime

It was a fairly painless update (thanks to the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address:

  • Avatars. WP 2.6 has much better support for Avatars ( used to identify authors of comments). But, my theme doesn’t natively support them so I’ve had to maintain use of the Easy Gravatars plugin.
  • Turbo mode. This is an admin. function, but basically it lets you
    speed up some admin functions with Gears integration. Gears behind my firewall is messy, but I will be trying this from more open connections in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing more of the 2.6 features in action, check out this .

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Jul

2

LinkedIn explained for the common folk!

Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life, Social Media | 3 Comments


LinkedIn explained for the common folk! (image: 256)Every time someone asks me to explain why I use and promote LinkedIn, it seems I have a good 15 or 20 minute conversation coming. Then they invariably want to check out my profile and see who I’m LinkedIn to.

Now I’ll just point them to this excellent CommonCraft video. , easy to understand, and entertaining. And they can easily get their own LinkedIn account.

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Jun

26

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not)

Filed Under Blogging, In the life, Social Media, Web | 4 Comments


How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not) (image: 256)Hey! How’ya doin’!
There are many ways to define your blog’s success; Hits, Links, Trackbacks, Comments, PageRank, Subscribers, etc.

These are all good indicators of activity. Your blog is busy. You’re getting a lot of pageviews. People are hitting and reading and crawling the pages and posts of your blog. All is good, according to the numbers.

But those are only numbers, not people with goals and needs — your visitors and their reason for visiting your blog. How do you measure up in the Visitor metric? I bet you won’t find that one in many analysis textbooks.

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not) (image: 256)Did you find what you’re looking for?
Good question! Because short of receiving or comment posts telling you about a problem or concern, you have no idea if the 30 unique visitors to your blog today managed to achieve their goal for visiting! You just know that they visited.

Current analytics platforms like StatCounter, Google Analytics, Microsoft AdCentre Analytics, or even the new live analytics application Woopra (more on that in another post), can’t really tell you if any visitor actually read and learned something from your latest post. They can only tell you what that visitor did while they were on your blog. Period.

Ask the question.
’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik recently launched a , little application (4Q) that will allow you better understand your visitor behaviour by presenting them with a friendly and polite ‘exit survey’ when they leave your blog.

The way it works.

4Q employs a two-stage invitation process. When visitors arrive at your site, they will be presented an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, will be launched and will wait in the background for the visitor to complete his or her session. 4Q surveys are designed to be collaborative brand building exercises, not annoying browsing interruptions.
(from the FAQ)

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not) (image: 256)What’s in it for me?
Knowledge. Direct feedback. 4Q survey results enable you to know that the sampled visitors said they’re happy, or unhappy. You know that they’ve said they’ve achieved their task or goal. And you’ve asked them for specific feedback so you can improve. All benefits for anyone who cares about improving the visitor’s .

So, to really know if your visitor was satisfied, you need to ask them. Nicely, politely, but ask them. It shows you care about your visitor’s .

Now you know, and you’re much better off that simply guessing based on the numbers. Oh happy day!

*** Update ***
Apologies for the not showing up. Bad formatting for Brad.

As well: as I noticed when replying to Margaret in the SocialMediaToday version:

…Also, one thing I neglected to mention in the post, the survey doesn’t
appear for every visitor. You can scale the sample rate in the
application. The default sample rate is 10% of the unique visitors, so
one in ten will be asked to participate…

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Jun

23

Tweaking your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin to support Wordpress 2.5+ tag feeds (easy!)

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Social Media | 4 Comments


FeedBurner Logo (© FeedBurner, Inc.)
Creative Commons License photo credit: magbag

Sorry for the uber tech in this post, but I thought this was a fix that anyone running a Wordpress 2.5+ blog could do if they wanted to enable ‘Tag Feeds’.

Before I get into the how, let’s explore the why briefly.

Some background:

The current incarnation of the FeedSmith / FeedBurner plugin doesn’t support the new feature of RSS Tag Feeds. No big deal if you don’t care about allowing your visitors to subscribe to your content based on Tag. But you’re missing an opportunity to allow your readers to better filter the content if that’s the case.

For example, lets say a visitor is only interested in receiving my posts on photography. They don’t care about all this , content, usability, or search engine optimization that I may be about. They only care about my photography posts. 2.5+ allows you to subscribe to any Tag Feed or Category Feed. But not if you’re using an unmodified FeedSmith plugin. Fear not, I’ve got a fix for you in a moment.

The way the current FeedSmith plugin works is that it takes all my feed subscription requests (comment, category, tag, etc) and returns only the main blog RSS feed, which is the main feed at Feedburner. Not good if you want to have an RSS Feed of only my photography tagged posts.

The workaround is quite and requires slightly modifying your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin. Here’s how:

  1. Navigate to the main Plugins page. Scroll down until you find the Feedburner / FeedSmith plugin. Click on the Disable link in the right-hand column. When the page refreshes, scroll back down and click on the Edit link.
  2. The Plugin Editor screen will open. Scroll down in the edit window until you find the function function ol_feed_redirect()
  3. In that section you’ll be adding text to a line of code. Change the text that reads
    is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() &&
     to read
    is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && !is_tag() &&
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and press the Update File button.
  5. Then, go back to the main Plugins page, and re-enable the FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin by clicking on the Enable link.

Congratulations, you’ve just re-enabled Tag RSS Feeds for your 2.5+ blog whilst maintaining Feedburner compatibility for the main feed.

Bonus for the advanced student: Since your Tag RSS Feeds are now separated from the main blog feed, you can set up discreet Feedburner feeds for select tags. Unfortunately the little above won’t automagically redirect RSS Subscriptions to Feedburner for you, as the FeedSmith Plugin does. You’ll have to manually publish the Feed URL, thusly:
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogbradgriercomWordpress">My tag feed hosted on Feedburner</a>

Which would render thusly:

My Wordpress tag feed hosted on Feedburner.

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