Hack
Add SEO Friendly Social Media Links To WordPress
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Blogging, Hack, Open Source, Promotion, SEM, Tools, Twitter | No Comments
Jeff from over at Perishable Press has just posted a handy guide to adding code to your WordPress theme that will enable you to offer SEO-Friendly, fully validating social media links for each of your pages or posts. If you want the easy way of adding social media links to your blog, there are countless WordPress plugins that will do just that, this method is for those of you who want to use as few plugins as possible (a real lean mean blogging machine!)
He gives the code for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and AddThis (with more sites provided in the comments).
Here’s an example for Digg.com:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Submit this post to Digg">Digg this!</a>
In order to add the code to each post, edit the single.php and paste in the appropriate code before the comments PHP tag. So you’d paste it before:
< ?php comments_template(); ?>
To add the code to your pages, edit page.php and paste the appropriate code after the PHP tag for your page content. So depending on your theme you’d paste it after:
< ?php the_content(); ?>
To have the links appear on the homepage after the end of each post, edit index.php and paste the appropriate code after the content PHP tag, though it might differ depending on your theme. So you’d paste the code this time after:
< ?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>
Go check out the full post for more examples.
Top 15 Twitter Power User Tools
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | AIR, Beta, Hack, RSS, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, WebApps | 2 Comments
With the hundreds of Twitter applications, websites, bots and scripts out there designed to do just about everything under the sun for you and your Twitter account, I decided to compile my own list of the top 15 Power User Twitter Tools that really provide the most value. Speaking of which, if you like this list or feel that something is missing from it, follow me on twitter – @brentter and let me know.
This is my latest addiction. It’s a free service that sends you an email update whenever someone un-follows your twitter account. I don’t know why, but I figure they send you an email when someone starts to follow you, they might as well send one when they leave.
Pretty much this is Twitter for those of you with too many ‘groups’ or followers. It lets you break down your ‘tweets’ into separate feeds that you determine. These can be based on a specific topic, affiliation, location or any other attribute you manage to dream up. It’s also an Adobe Air desktop application that’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs from time-to-time.
Here’s a service that tracks all the links posted on Twitter and ranks them based on the number of recent appearances. There are then many different filter options you can run on the list to narrow it down and even an export function to grab it as an RSS feed.
Twitterfeed takes any RSS feed and posts it to your twitter account. Made specifically for auto-updating your twitter account every time you post a new entry on your blog, Twitterfeed can easily be used to post new entries from in just about any RSS feed (i.e. baseball scores from espn.com).
Now here’s a unique new service that’s still in beta and aimed at those trying to utilize Twitter as a marketing tool. With EasyTweets you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule future tweets (i.e. special announcements), post items from your RSS feed and more. It’s still pretty new but is shaping up to be a great utility for managing your brand identity on Twitter.
#Hashtags are a way to automatically add your tweet to a specific category, for instance lets say I wanted to create a single location for anyone to be able to add to and see what’s being said about NYE09 on Twitter. I would just go and create the hashtag #NYE09 and anytime that a tweet contained #NYE09, it would automatically be added to the hashtag.org website. The beauty of this service is each hashtag has its own RSS feed and usage statistics. To start using hashtags all you have to do is follow @hashtags and anything with a # in front of it will be added to that specific group.
These aren’t really a ‘must use’ but they are pretty neat. They’re icons that twitter accepts as valid characters in tweets. To use them, just copy and paste the desired icon into your message box and voila!
A free collection of unique background patterns for twitter. Pretty cool designs to choose from created by the folks from olivemanna.
Here’s a service that lets you email twitter updates to your account as well as gives you the option to have all your twitter replies emailed back to you.
Here’s a cool new service that monitors keyword density on twitter to show us what the ‘Hot Trends’ might be, or at least what is the most popular topic. It’s updated every 20 seconds and also has a widget & RSS feed for your own personal use.
Here’s a brand-spanking-new service that lets your monitor/track twitter for up to three separate terms in real-time. It also lets you narrow the results based on the users location. RSS feeds available as well.
It’s a URL shortening service that also lets you track how many times people click on your link. Works with both Twitter and FriendFeed.
This is a cool little tool that lets you compare trends in Twitter through a variety of different graphical methods. It also has the latest “Hot Before” and “Hot Now” terms sweeping across the Twittsphere. This may look familiar because it was used a lot to show the difference in social media mentions that Barack Obama received compared to McCain in the last few weeks of the election.
Graph your Twitter stats including tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and your reply statistics.
Twitter Search (formerly Summize)
Real-time searching of what’s being said on Twitter. Each search provides it’s own RSS feed along with the ability to search for specific users (i.e. @brentter). Formerly known as Summize, it was purchased by Twitter earlier this year. One more thing to note, it auto-updates with each new addition your search.
So, what do you use to manage your Twitter account? Tell me on here or by following me at @brentter on Twitter.
Opentape – The Free, OpenSource Alternative to Muxtape
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | Hack, Music, New Beginnings, Open Source, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
With the recent demise of Muxtape, a group of developers have gotten together to release an open-source online mixtape package named Opentape.
Personally I think this application is far superior to Muxtape, which recently had been forced offline by the RIAA for copyright infringement. You can upload songs to your Opentape server via web or FTP, rename, reorder, customize the style and then share the mix on any website through an embedded player.
They’ve even set up a twitter account so you can stay updated on their progress/new releases via tweets. Find them at @opentape.
Visit opentape.fm to read more about the project, or click here to go to the direct download page.
Requirements
Apache 1.x, 2.x with PHP 5. Many other webservers will do fine as well.
PHP 5 curl extension is required for update notification and publishing to the Opentape Discovery Network.Supported/Tested Browsers
Firefox 3.0.1/OS X
Opera 9.52/OS X
Safari 3/OS XFirefox 2.0.0.11/Win
Opera 9.52/Win
Safari 3/Win
IE 7/Win
IE 6/Win (styles have errors)
Dual Boot Your iPhone!
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 | Apple, Hack, Tools, Utilities, iPod | No Comments
A big problem with the iPhone is that every time Apple releases a software update, those that have unlocked or used some sort of Jailbreak software on it find themselves with an expensive phone that no longer works. A combination of this and the recent release of the iPhone SDK had me thinking about whether or not it would be possible to run multiple versions of the system software so that if an update (or an application I might be testing) were to ruin the phone, there still would be another, working copy available.
This would prevent me from having to do a full-reset anytime I screw up, and/or find myself with a dead phone…… the question then becomes, is it possible to dual-boot an iPhone?
YES
I came across an article last night which tells you exactly how to be able to dual-boot your iPhone in different versions of the system software.
A word of warning though, this is no easy task and primarily involves using the command line, so I would not suggest this for the novice user.
The article was written in part by Jonathan “NerveGas” Zdziarski, a programmer notorious for his iPhone hacks as well as author to recently released book, iPhone Open Application Development. Zdziarski was also the creative mind behind a whole gamut of other iPhone innovations – everything from a Nintendo Emulator to even developing an initial technique that would enable the usage of SSH in your iPhone apps. You can find his blog here – www.zdziarski.com/ but if you really want the most up-to-date scoop on iPhone enhancements/hacks, head on over to their irc channel – #iPhone.
In case you just upgraded your iPhone’s firmware to 1.1.4, here’s a post regarding how to jailbreak it from cre.ations.net, or you can go directly to the source and download ZiPhone.
[original source - iPhone Atlas -- photo credit: the Boy Genius Report]
Other Places You Can Find Me:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
