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 . 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 , load a tab in my browser, etc.
  • Twitter Twerp Scan — If you care about managing your Followers, then you need to run the Twerp from time to time. Basically, Twerp checks your account for 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 ). 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 who follow you. Reducing your maintenance chores, though I’d remember to run TwerpScan from time to time :) Just to nuke the Twerps.

Sep

14

Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life, Review, Web | 4 Comments


Google Chrome Logo
Creative Commons License photo credit: Randy Zhang

Google Chrome is no Firefox (yet).

For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Chrome (’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based systems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very efficient, and stable. Pretty good performance for a ‘beta’.

I do have concerns about the way Chrome appears to ‘monitor’ my surfing activity (by using Google Gears functionality), but then again, I use Gmail and other Google Apps so I’m sure the Big G knows all about me at this point.

But, without plugin extensibility, Chrome is currently a curiosity. I won’t be using it for my daily work.

One major annoyance is the lack of Adblock. The is a very marketing-heavy place, and I prefer to selectively view my advertising. The Adblock extension for Firefox allows this.

To achieve an advertising-reduced surfing with Chrome, I need to use Privoxy, a local managing Proxy server. It’s a quick install and seems to work flawlessly.

A solution to this for now is http://www.privoxy.org/

1.) Install Privoxy
2.) Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner
3.) Choose options>Under The Hood> proxy settings
4.) A box pops up, choose LAN settings (at least this is what it’s called in Vista)
5.) Check off “Proxy settings” and in the address setting add127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118
6.) If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for local settings”
7.) Click “Ok”, close chrome and restart it. 

Tada. Enjoy.

Geekzone provided the process (thanks guys!)

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 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.

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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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. are hitting and and crawling the pages and posts of your blog. All is good, according to the numbers.

But those are only numbers, not 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 ! 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 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 .
’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik recently launched a , little (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
. The default sample rate is 10% of the unique visitors, so
one in ten will be asked to participate…

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May

29

Use Web 2.0 tools to save time and be more productive

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


Someone's Lost Schedule Book
Creative Commons License photo credit: ASurroca

For a while I’ve been using a few 2.0 applications that, on their own, are great, but when when partnered with other 2.0 apps, become superstar efficiency optimizers.

The applications
Consider Jott, IWantSandy, and Twitter.

Jott is a to text . You call a number, say your message, and moments later it’s emailed to you (or a group), turned into a reminder, added to a list, or sent to 2.0 applications (called Jott ).

IWantSandy is a ‘virtual assistant’. She’s able to manage your , build and manage lists, manage groups, and share your lists with others.

is a ’status update’ that allows you to post your status (your to the “What are you doing?”).

Connections are key
Standalone, they’re all good, solid, 2.0 applications. But where they really begin to shine is when you let them talk to each other, and other applications. Here’s a example:

  • Use to have Sandy remind you to backup your blog on the 13th of each month
  • In the window type d s r the blog on June 13, 2008 @monthly
  • which means Direct message to Sandy (s is Sandy’s name), Reminder (r) …(the text Sandy is to remember) on June 13, 2008 (the start date of the reminder) @monthly (a special Sandy tag to make the event repeat.

Depending how you’ve got Sandy set up, you’ll be reminded through , or SMS message to your mobile device (or all three).

AFK? Use Jott When I’m out and about, I use Jott to work with Sandy to get things done. Here’s the same example using Jott:

  • (Dial into local Jott number, Jott answers) Who do you want to Jott?
  • (Me) Sandy.
  • (Jott) Sandy.(repeats to confirm) Is this correct?
  • (Me) Yes.
  • (Jott) Got it. BEEP-TONE-TO-RECORD
  • (Me) Reminder. the Blog on June 13th 2008. Tag Monthly.

Extending further
, Jott and IWantSandy all embrace openness, to varying degrees. Depending how you configure each, they can update your calendar ( Calendar, 30Boxes, etc), your local through CSV or iCal files, really the sky is the limit.

So, what have I missed? How are you using these (or other applications) to make your life easier?

May

27

Things I learned moving my blog to a new hosting service (it’s easy!)

Filed Under Blogging, How to | 3 Comments


Things I learned moving my blog to a new hosting service (its easy!) (image: 2526037333_07b840e3ec_o)Over the last few weeks you’ll may have noticed that I’ve been and twittering about my blog from the .net to .com.

A few years ago I managed to grab BradGrier.com when it came open, but I’d not decided what to do with it until recently. I’d been having some performance issues (my blog, that is) and decided to test a new hosting provider.

So, the issue. How to move the blog, keep the same look and feel, not lose any Google Juice, and not lose any feed subscribers. Not a trivial set of considerations!

Of course, I turned to my good for advice:

  • How to Move Your Wordpress Blog To A New Web hosting - great technical advice on backing up and restoring your WP blog
  • Use the WordPress Database Backup plugin - I wrote about it recently when my blog crashed, but backups created with it are entirely suitable for use in blog migration
  • Redirecting incoming traffic to the new blog - well, since I’m using the same data structures and permalink structure, the only is one from .net to .com, this was quite ; a .htaccess 301 redirect as described here and here. Slightly technical, but not really too tough.
  • subscribers was also quite , since I use Feedburner to manage subscriptions: simply the Feed Title and Original Feed URL on the Feedburner Feed Details page. DO NOT THE FEED ADDRESS as this will disconnect your readers from your feed — a bad thing :)

A couple of other observations:

  • Set up your new blog/destination site first. Complete importing your data and building your look and feel. Yes, also duplicate posting to this site. You will want to make sure as your readers move they don’t lose any …especially for the tardy ones.
  • Immediately the Feed address in Feedburner. Any new subscribers will never notice, as you are posting to both sites right?
  • Prominently post about the fact that you are your blog. Add a widget or two to the sidebar (make them obvious) to alert your readers to the fact that you are . You want them to begin to identify with the new URL, not the old one, as soon as possible.
  • After a week or two, close commenting on the old feed, with a message directing readers to the new site.
  • After another week or two implement 301 redirects. And test them! @hownottowrite and @lijit both recommended, through twitter, this HTTP header scanning tool and FireFox plugin to validate the redirects (thanks again!).
  • Finally, remember every place you’ve ever used the URL / name, and it.

So, after all that…did you notice? :)

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May

14

Engaging in ‘high risk’ activity - moving my blog

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, Web | 2 Comments


Engaging in high risk activity - moving my blog (image: 20562069_7cf1e2aaec_m)I’ve decided to take the plunge and move my blog to a more traditional .com type (rather than the .net that I currently use). I’m going to keep the .net for more esoteric things, private server, etc.

If you’re this on the old blog (blog.bradgrier.net), then please jump over to the new one, bookmark it, and check it out to make sure it works as you expect. You can find it at blog.bradgrier.com.

The dot-com is more , have a standard ‘expectation ‘of a site or blog when it has a .com address. A .net address seems to have a different ‘expectation’. And I felt the need to try out a new provider.

So, this will mean a bit of :

  • feeds - already moved my feedburner redirects so there should be no disruption
  • Incoming - not sure what to do about this yet. Incoming add value to your ranking, so this transition will cost me some of that precious Google Juice
  • Site duplication - some of the articles I’ve been about domains suggest maintaining duplicate sites for a few months. I’m thinking about this. It may work, but I’d customize the so that some sort of ‘ moved’ message is appended to the feeds etc

But, I’m not the expert here, just the guy doing the work. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about domains? What should I watch out for? What should I do differently?

: David Asch

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