Ms. Burrows’ Mapworks WordPress Plugin

By Colleen, on September 16th, 2010%

My friend Jillian Burrows just released a MapWorks plugin for wordpress and this is just me trying it out. I think it is just a question of shortcode and perhaps it installs a graphic in the public page to enable you to get more information. You can read the README just as well as . . . → Read More: Ms. Burrows’ Mapworks WordPress Plugin

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Embed.ly: One API to rule them all

By Colleen, on April 3rd, 2010%

Something very very cool fell into my inbox today.

The back story
I had been researching OEmbed kind of as a background project to see if I could use it in my own stuff. Now what is OEmbed, you ask? It is a specification by which a simple link transforms itself into rich content. If . . . → Read More: Embed.ly: One API to rule them all

9 comments - (Comments are closed)   Front End Frameworks, Geek Stuff, Multimedia   , , , , , , , ,  

Testing Google Friend Connect

By Colleen, on April 4th, 2009%

When Google talks, I at least pay attention. Whether you like them or not, no one can deny that Google has a great deal of KLOUT on the interwebz. This Google Friend Connect thing is the latest scuttlebutt. Of course I have to try it, even though I’m not insanely hopeful that it’s going to do anything for me. Most Google thingies seem to follow the biblical model (paraphrased by me):

To them that hath, more shall be given, and thou that hath not spinneth thy wheels in vain.

Continue reading Testing Google Friend Connect

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Dofollows Part II

By Colleen, on December 18th, 2008%

nofolloway31 This post started as a follow-on comment to my post “Not All Dofollows are created Equal,” but it started to get long and linky, so it became a new post. In the previous dofollow post, I was wondering why, given the number of comments I write on other blogs, I get so few inbound links from comments, and so few inbound links on my WP dashboard in general.   There are a lot of blogs that claim, as mine does, to be dofollow blogs, and/or to offer comment luv.  I am much more likely to comment on a blog that has dofollow and/or commentluv.   So why so few incoming from comments? And the reverse side of the coin: Does my “dofollow” blog generate the kind of link luv that I intend it to for people who comment on it? Let’s test.

Continue reading Dofollows Part II

16 comments - (Comments are closed)   Geek Stuff, Hacking and Security   , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  

Not all dofollows are created equal

By Colleen, on December 16th, 2008%

nofolloway31I comment on plenty of of blogs. I never noticed my comments scoring me serious incoming links on my WP dashboard, even from so-called “dofollow” blogs. That’s what dofollows are meant to do — increase your incoming link count, and ultimately bump your Google PR.

Continue reading Not all dofollows are created equal

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When Monkeys Fly Out My A$$ OR My TweetThis Hack

By Colleen, on December 9th, 2008%

I was recently reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on how he uses Twitter.   I was thinking, sure, Twitterfeed is great because it tweets my blog posts as me, but it would be even nicer if my awesome readers had a button to tweet my blog post as them in one click, i.e.  without the brain cell killing mousage/keyboardage of 1) shrinking the URL, 2) going to twitter and 3) copy/pasting the title. That’s a good thing in three ways:

  • More cred for you if someone else besides you tweets your stuff,
  • more potential reach,
  • your friend who tweets for you appears magnanimous and with it to all his followers.

It sounded like something that would be easy to automate  and useful to a lot of people, so I thought, there has to be a WordPress plugin to do that. Sure enough there is – Tweet This by Richard X Thripp.
Continue reading When Monkeys Fly Out My A$$ OR My TweetThis Hack

22 comments - (Comments are closed)   Fun Web and Blog Goodies, Geek Stuff, Hacking and Security, Monetizing   , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  

Using Blogger as a front end

By Colleen, on November 19th, 2008%

One of my web developer friends evolved her own custom CMS several years ago, when there the opensource CMS’s (a la Drupal, Joomla, et al) were not nearly as good as they are now.   In the past few years many of her clients have wanted to start blogs.  Writing her own blogging module seemed a bit silly in this day and age when there is so much free blogging software available.   She considered what a lot of site owners do– installing a wordpress and hooking it to either a subdomain or a subdirectory of the main client site, but it was not her choice, mainly because if you self-host a wordpress you have to maintain and update it, and most of her clients were not willing to foot the bill for their own private hosted wordpress.   She might have minimized their cost if she had them all running blogs out of a single wordpress install, but  I do not think she considered wordpress mu, or doing what I have done, which is essentially my own homespun mu setup done with symlinks.   Her solution was to use Blogger!

Continue reading Using Blogger as a front end

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Put Bloglines to work for your WordPress blogroll

By Colleen, on May 25th, 2008%

Warning:  If you are not a WordPress blogger who can install your own plugins you might wish to skip this post.

Bloglines is my feed reader of choice because it’s simple and hierarchical. I’m going to show you a neat little trick I did on a wordpress blog to make a compact, organized, and best of all automatically updating blogroll. If you are a wordpresser you know that you have links, but who the heck wants to put them in one by one?  What I’m going to show you is how to leverage Bloglines to do your blogroll for you.

Continue reading Put Bloglines to work for your WordPress blogroll

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