3 Top Tools To Tame Twitter

 

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

As Twitter moves into its more mature phase, a number of Twitter utilities have emerged, some good, some not so good. I’m an early adopter and a daily Twitter user and have experimented with many Twitter tools over time. Please feel free to follow me but without further blather, here’s my top 3, must have, twitter tools:

• TwitThis.com — Though showing its age, TwitThis is a very cool tool. In a nutshell, simply browse to a web page that you want to share. Click the TwitThis bookmarklet (that you’ve previously installed). If you’re not logged in to Twitter, you’ll be prompted to do so.  A window pops up, and you can edit your Tweet and then send it to your Twitter stream. I like it because for quick Tweets, I don’t have to jump to another application, load a Twitter tab in my browser, etc.
• Twitter Twerp Scan — If you care about managing your Twitter Followers, then you need to run the Twitter Twerp Scan from time to time. Basically, Twerp Scan checks your Twitter account for people 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 ‘Twitter 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 links). 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 Twitter for a while, are used to updating your followers, and have a good social network online that notices when you’re not there. Or you’re the Communications specialist for an organization that uses Twitter to keep your audience 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 cool and not-so-obvious feature: you can also set TweetLater up to autofollow people who follow you. Reducing your Twitter maintenance chores, though I’d remember to run TwerpScan from time to time 🙂 Just to nuke the Twerps.

I love mashing technology! (freebies)

Moo + LinkedIn = Free Business Cards

I’ve written before about Moo (cards & stickers) and LinkedIn (the business social network), but this is the first time I’ve written about both in the same post.

Short story.
Moo is letting you make 50 of their beautiful photo-enhanced business cards for free!

It’s really mashup²
Moo itself is a mashup of the traditional business card printing business, an online card creation and billing model, and an ability to import images from Flickr and other sources. The new mashup component is that you can import parts of your LinkedIn profile into the card creation process.

And 50 free Moo cards is always cool.

Technorati Tags: mashup, social media, business, printing, cards, moo, LinkedIn, cool, technology

How to spice up your online identity with Gravatars

If you’ve ever read a post on a blog and noticed a small photo or image associated with each author, or associated with authors of comments, then you’ve seen an ‘avatar‘.

A few years ago, Gravatar launched as a way to allow people to store an avatar in a single location, and it would automatically be used on blogs utilizing Gravatar technology.

The way it works is you simply create a Gravatar account, providing the email address you want to associate with your avatar, and upload your avatar image.

The magic happens behind the scene when you create a post or comment. The blog you’d just commented on looks up your email address on the Gravatar server and provides the image on file.

If you want to update your avatar, just change the image at Gravatar and you’re done…everywhere Gravatar-supporting site you ever left a comment at will use your update image.

As an aside, I use Gravatar here. Leave a comment and if you have a Gravatar avatar, you’ll see it appear. If you don’t have one though, you’ll see a very cool kiladescope pattern called an ‘identicon‘. This is another Gravatar feature that creates and stores unique, math-based avatar images for folks without avatars. The idea is that everyone gets an image…consistant with their online identity.

Very cool, and community building too boot!

How to find new things to read online…use the Human Filter!

photo credit: photopia / HiMY SYeD

I’m an information junkie. I also share a lot of what I find with coworkers, friends, etc. So when people ask me where I dig this stuff up I often respond “just found while surfing” or “in my RSS feed”. I usually only pass on what I think is good. I call this Human Filtering.

Back in May, Chris Garrett launched this thread on Authority Blogger Forum. The concept was to develop a Blogging Pack with the goal to increase the quality readership of the blogs involved:

First read Michaels post
http://michaelmartine.com/2008/05/14…subscriptions/

Second, add your feed URL and Twitter account to this thread

Third we all subscribe to each blog and follow each Twittererer (I will do an OPML file when we have enough people join in to make it easy to subscribe to each)

Fourth we should each at random stumble, favorite and/or comment on a recent post from as many articles THAT WE ACTUALLY LIKE in the pack as we can manage

Sound good?

We have around 1000 users of this forum, should give any blog a good boost if we all join in

So I joined, received a pretty good spike in RSS feed subscriptions, and was exposed to a vast array of new blogs to read.

And now we’re getting to the meat of this post, I’m going to profile a few of those blogs – just the ones that appeal to me. I’ll do this from time to time.

• Codswallop — one of Chris Garrett’s blogs. A good example of how to run a technology blog…with a side niche on productivity. I’m not sure what’s up with its URL though: http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/
• Freelance Switch — a big and bright blog dedicated to moving folks into Freelancing. Full of all sorts of advice and information.
• How Not To Write — yes, it’s a blog about writing…sort of. Or about the times between writing when you should be writing, are thinking of writing, but not. Or redefining ‘writing’ from writing…and I’m not sure which is which or even if I’m doing either, but the blog is a good read.

Over the next few weeks I’ll profile others that catch my attention.  Stay tuned…

3 things I learned when my WordPress blog crashed.

This week my blog crashed. It could have been a mess, but due to foresight, paranoia, and a lot of good advice from other bloggers, it was actually a pretty simple recovery process.

But, without some essential plugins and basic knowledge, it all would have been lost. So here’s the what and why of what I’d learned the day my blog crashed.

Daily backup is your friend – the most important thing you can do for your WordPress blog is download and install the WordPress Database Backup plugin. Yes, there are many plugins out there (take a look at the plugins I use) but this one should be standard on any WordPress blog. It literally saved my blog. Basically it does what it says, creates a backup of your WP database. Then saves it on your server, or emails it to an account of your choice. The backup is actually a MySQL rebuild script which you run after you’ve cleaned out your DB. Worked like a charm the first time.

Know how to run MySQL queries – the above backup is useless if you don’t know how to reinstall it. In my case, since I’d been running WordPress since version one-point-something-or-other, I decided to do a completely new install. What I did was:

• Rename my existing blog directory. This disconnected it from my domain name and structure, yet let me have access to my original files for reference when rebuilding
• Install the latest version of WordPress.
• Clear the MySQL database. This deletes all blog entries and related data.
• Run the MySQL backup query. In my case, I uploaded it into phpMyAdmin, the tool of choice for managing MySQL databases.
• Reinstall plugins and themes. This was a great opportunity to review all the plugins I had previously installed, determine my need for them, and then download and reinstall fresh copies.
• Reinstall supporting files and data. I copied image and other support files from my renamed ‘old blog’ directory. Customizations such as the ‘external link icons’, default Gravatar images, etc.

Start from a clean reinstall – as I mentioned above, I’d been running WordPress since the early days. It’s entirely possible that there was something from my many tweaks and customizations that borked the site. So, by starting from a clean install, I have a new, fresh baseline.

And, since I still have my original blog files stored in a renamed directory, if I forgot anything in my rebuilding of the blog, I can easily refer to my original and fix it up.

Photo courtesy PPDigital