Hot Dorkage

Feedburner will create an animated banner that cycles through the five most recent items on any RSS feed. I used it to create an IAB standard 468×60 banner promoting my tweets. There are excrutiatingly detailed instructions with screendumps over on my companion hub at hubpages (let them host the frakkin’ screendumps) but in a nutshell:

• Get your feed from wherever
• Burn it at feedburner
• Choose the publicise tag
• Choose Headline Animator option
• Configure your banner, if you use a custom background it must be a GIF hosted on the web somewhere (your blog would be fine)
• Activate, save and grab the code.

Here is my promotional banner for my twitter microblog:

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Did you ever get sick of making up a user name and password to each and every one of those websites where you have to have user names and passwords? A lot of folks try to simplify by using the same id and pass on every site, but that’s dangerous, because if just one site is compromised or untrustworthy, the bad guy can guess your login at all the others. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a SINGLE secure identity that was recognized all over the internet without requiring each site to know your password? Now you can –it’s an Open Source initiative called OpenID. Right now the bottleneck is the relatively small number of websites that support OpenID login. I first heard about OpenID at the last SAO talk in January by Scott Kveton of MyStrands. Continue Reading…