Just came across a new service that’s been officially approved by Twitter.com: introducing TweepML, an XML based format for sharing lists of twitter user accounts. If you know what OPML is then you already know the concept behind TweepML, it provides a free universal framework for importing, exporting and creating twitter ‘groups’ that can be shared or even stored as a backup of important accounts. The main website, www.tweepml.org, also includes a free follow tool that helps streamline following lists of users via your twitter account.

On the site it has various libraries and examples available to aid developers in implementing TweepML into new or existing apps. Currently the most popular lists seem to be the ones with the largest number of followers. I’d be willing to bet good money that this is already being used by spammers and/or marketers to cultivate their own twitter accounts targeting various ‘groups’ featured on the site…but then again, almost every tool or platform that is useful has the potential for grey/blackhat usage.

Interesting new format, it’s definitely going to make twitter account sharing (not to mention account duplication) a lot easier!

found via mashable

If you use twitter you’ve undoubtably come across a twitter bot, sadly there’s a very good chance it was because it was spamming you. In this post I’ll provide you with all the tools, source code and know-how to be able to build and launch your own twitter bot, and i’ll even give you resources to do it in the programming language of your choice. Why? Because there are so many positive uses for a twitter bot….including anti-spam! Go take a look at the twitter tag project for some good examples of bots currents on twitter if you’re not able to come up with any on your own.

First, if you’d like to fool around with an automated bot on twitter but lack the technical knowhow, go pay a visit to the Botomatic site. There you can create your own bot using their easy-to-use GUI. It’ll take you two seconds and you will be up and running.

If you’re a beginner, have no fear there’s a pre-configured setup for you as well. Go download and install the Twitterbotscript from Tyler Colwell. It’s 100% free and was coded to include a helpful GUI to control the bot functionality. It’s actually a pretty cool package that uses the API. I’ve taken a lot of his code and re-used it in various test bots of my own so i’d definitely recommend anyone looking to script their own bot in PHP to download his app.

Now for the PHP programmers out there, the first example of a great PHP5 twitter bot framework is from the folks over at ohloh.net (Jason Allen and Scott Collison). This one is setup to allow you to search and retweet what you’ve found.

If you’d like to incorporate Jabber/XMPP into the bot (that way you can access it via gchat), then there’s a great tutorial over on jazzychad.com. Tenderapp.com has on their blog a PHP tutorial with full source-code for a twitter bot that will look up the traffic conditions and tweet them when messaged. This one also has a walk-through for getting it up on xmpp/jabber. Here’s the source for a similar bot that looks up the weather and retweets it on command.

If you’d like to setup a twitter bot using Python, Halotis.com has a great tutorial that uses a sqlite backend to keep track of what it’s messaged. For a more elaborate version of an automated bot using python, there’s a script over on the flowingdata.com blog that also incorporates a local mail server to send and receive messages to the bot.

Last but not least, all of you Ruby folks….here’s a Twitter Ruby Gem to go along with the Twitter4R and Twitter Ruby Gems already found in the library. The site also takes you through a few different commands available with this new gem. For complete source-code of a twitter bot written in Ruby, head on over to this snippet of a Ruby RSS Twitter Bot.

Easy as pie and now you’ve got your very own automated twitter bot!

Coudal – The Fish Puzzle
Have some time to waste? Good, you’ll need it!

20 Ajax Effects You Need To Learn
Tutorials and source code, just how I like it.

Smush.it Image Optimizer
Quick and easy website that will optimize your images for viewing on the web. It’s an open-source project run by one of the members of Yahoo!’s “Exceptional Performance Team” – The same group that put out their YSlow Firefox application!

Enjoy!

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&amp;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.

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 X

Firefox 2.0.0.11/Win
Opera 9.52/Win
Safari 3/Win
IE 7/Win
IE 6/Win (styles have errors)