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WordPress.com Rolls its Own URL Shortening Service

By Scott Gilbertson August 21st, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing, Software & Tools

In what we’re hoping is the beginning of a trend, WordPress.com has announced a new built-in URL-shortening service for all of its hosted blogs. Now, when you create a post on your WordPress.com blog, you’ll see an option to create a short URLs using the new wp.me domain.

Publishers using the self-hosted version of WordPress will be able to use wp.me short links if they are running the official stats plug-in.

The new wp.me short links are coupled directly to the canonical URL and can be found in the headtags of any blog hosted on WordPress.com. That means, unlike outside URL shortening services, as long as WordPress.com is around, your shortened wp.me links will work. And if WordPress.com goes under? Well, it doesn’t matter because the canonical link will go with it.

As for the actual URL shortener, it’s pretty basic with no real stats tracking or other services like those offered by bit.ly and tr.im. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg does mention in his announcement that if your post’s slug is short enough, it’ll be used for the wp.me URL. Otherwise, a random, unique key is used.

If you’d like to start using wp.me links for your WordPress hosted blog just click the new “Get Shortlink” button. Also note that if you’re logged in to WordPress.com you can get the shortlink for any page, just click the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.

Short URLs seem a necessary evil at this particular moment in the web’s history. While we’re not going to lie and say they’re a good idea, if you have to use them we’d suggest looking to your publishing platform rather than an outside service. Hopefully more publishers and publishing tools will follow WordPress.com’s lead and start offering their own URL shortening tools.

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Let Google’s Matt Cutts Up Your SEO Mojo

By Michael Calore August 20th, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing

People in the SEO business consider Google’s Matt Cutts to be the grand poobah numero uno of search. Like a Jedi master, he is both extremely powerful and filled with knowledge about the universe.

Lucky for us, he’s also very much into sharing that knowledge and power.

No matter how many books, articles and tutorials you’ve read about search engine optimization, you should watch this video. It’s a recording of a talk Cutts gave at this year’s WordCamp — an unconference for WordPress users. It’s funny, super-informative and just over 45 minutes long.

Thanks to Barry Schwartz, who posted this to Search Engine Land earlier today.


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Awesome How-To Site Helps Beginners Navigate WordPress

By Michael Calore July 20th, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing, Web Basics

Check out WPBeginner, an excellent site filled with tutorials and advice for budding web builders getting started with WordPress.

Every professional web developer has been asked at some point by a relative or close friend to “help me build a website.”

Our web skills play a large part in endearing us to our non-technical friends, and everyone likes to be appreciated, but that request probably makes you shudder every time you hear it.

Tools like WordPress have grown so terribly easy to use, most people are capable of building a simple site with a blog, a photo gallery, contact form and other simple functionality all by themselves. They just don’t know it, and building things on the web is such unfamiliar territory, they simply haven’t bothered to fully explore their options.

Go ahead and point them to WPBeginner. It’s an impressive repository of clearly-written articles on how to install and set up WordPress, including advice on picking and installing themes and plug-ins — Akismet, Super Cache and Feedsmith are on the recommended list. For absolute beginners, there’s also a list of WordPress-friendly hosting providers, advice on picking and purchasing a good domain name and advice on using the latest social tools to increase readership.

The editorial staff actively responds to user questions in the comments on all the articles, too, so it’s a good place to go for help.

For the seasoned users, there are more advanced tutorials and articles about customizing layouts, improving search rankings and using JQuery.

WPBeginner also offers a free WordPress setup service. They’ll install a simple blog site for you free of charge — all they ask is that you name them as a referral with one their partnered hosting providers.

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Facebook Opens Up Publisher - Now Go Tell Everyone

By Michael Calore June 25th, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing, Platforms & APIs

Facebook users will soon gain the ability to publish content so that everyone on the web can view it. This will lead a big change for Facebook users, many of whom have been limited to sharing content only with others on Facebook.

The social network has invited its beta testers to experiment with a new version of the site’s Publisher feature, the web-based tool Facebookers use to post status updates, photos and videos to their profiles.

This latest development, announced Wednesday, is only available to beta testers who have made their Facebook profiles visible publicly to everyone, not just Facebook users. The features will be made available soon to other users, the company says. This development also falls in line with Facebook’s support for Activity Streams, the emerging standard for organizing and adding structure to these streams of updates, photos, videos and comments.

The new Publisher contains some added privacy controls, enabling uesrs to push out posts to just their Facebook friends or everyone, on or off Facebook.

Interestingly, the default setting is “Everyone” — showing Facebook is offering some gentle encouragement to its users to share their posts with the whole internet.

Wired.com writer Ryan Singel points out the significance of this on Epicenter:

Clearly the intent is to convince users to publish to the world, since the default is set to “Everyone” — which means the entire internet — with the choice to narrow to “Friends,” “Friends of Friends,” “networks,” or select users when more privacy is wanted. It’s plainly an attempt to gather some of the energy and publicness of Twitter for Facebook, which has largely shied away from exposing its members’ activities outside its online walls.

…

Facebook also tipped its hat to Twitter three months ago with changes that added focus to real-time status updates and a change to the status question, which became: “What’s on your mind?” Twitter’s pre-existing equivalent is “What are you doing?”

We here at Webmonkey (and Epicenter) have been arguing for some time that Facebook should open up its network to allow the publishing of content outside its walls. The company has always balked at such a strategy, saying such a move would violate the trust of its users who have come to expect the strictest of privacy controls.

However, it seems Facebook may have found a way to open up the publishing ability while keeping those much-valued privacy controls intact.

Photo: Flickr/Andrew Feinberg

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TwitCaps Gives Photographic Insight to Twitter’s Zeitgeist

By Michael Calore June 2nd, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing

TwitCaps is extraordinary. The newly launched website displays the most recent photos posted to Twitter via the various photo-sharing sites tied in to the microblogging platform.

The TwitCaps frontdoor is captivating. Every tweeted photo, from the mundane to the extraordinary, is lined up in reverse-chronological order. You can hover over each picture and see the original tweet, but that kind of kills the fun. It’s more interesting to look at the photos completely out of context and just soak up the various juxtapositions.

The site tells me two very important things about Twitter. First, users are spread out over the world more completely than I previously thought. And, second, by flipping over to the most popular page, I now realize that Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift are completely owning Twitter.

Bonus: Hackable URLs.


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Much Ado About @reply

By Michael Calore May 13th, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing, Platforms & APIs

In what was billed as a “small settings change,” Twitter updated its default behavior for displaying @replies Tuesday. Many users feel this change neuters the service, removing one of the most significant ways of discovering new people and finding new conversations.

As expected, the internet burst into flames upon hearing the news, with atavistic outrage quickly spreading far and wide. By early Wednesday morning, the hashtag #fixreplies was the hottest trend on Twitter.

Here’s the official explanation from Twitter’s blog:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

This means that even if you’re following somebody, you won’t see everything they post. You’ll still see the tweets where they don’t add another user’s name, and the tweets where they reply to you or to somebody else you’re following. What you won’t see is any tweet they send in reply to somebody you’re not following.

If you follow me, but not @sally, you won’t see this tweet:

@sally OMG i totally agree!

It’s important to distinguish a reply from a mention. The above example is a reply. Mentions (including retweets) will still show up, so you’ll see this tweet:

Heading to lunch with @sally

Twitter refers to those disjointed replies as “fragmented conversations.” Ever since 2007, Twitter has given its users the ability to see all @replies, regardless of who they’re addressed to, or to filter them out. Now, the option to see all of them has been removed because Twitter feels they clutter up the flow of information on the service.

The more tech-savvy Twitterati disagree. Read Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick calls the one-sided replies “serendipitous social discovery.” Web designer Jason Kottke calls them “the magic.”

The voices of dissent have a very good point — Part of the value I gain from following somebody is the ability to study who they’re following. By listening in on the conversations you’re having with the people who influence and inspire you, I gain the opportunity to be influenced and inspired by them as well.

So, why the change now? Blogger Dave Winer’s theory is the celebs who have flooded Twitter recently were being overwhelmed by @replies from people they don’t know, or care to know. Just as likely, new users grew irritated having to read messages from their friends sent to celebs they don’t care about.

Either way, all Twitter did was remove a setting that’s been there for over a year because, it says, the option was too “confusing.” To correct this error, all Twitter needs to do is add the option back in and change the default state. Which is really what it should have done in the first place.

One of the great things about Twitter is that it’s totally open. You can use it however you want — as a breaking news channel, as a way to chat with your friends, as a way to follow celebrities or (and you’ll burn in hell for this) as a new method of spamming people. Twitter has tools in place to filter out any activities that clutter up whatever use case you’ve outlined for yourself.

So please, Twitter, let us choose our own filters. Then we can all go back to eavesdropping on the semi-public conversations our friends are having with the cool and interesting people we haven’t yet met.

We’ll likely see the replies settings go back to the way they were before long, possibly as early as Wednesday. Before co-founder Evan Williams went to bed Tuesday night, he tweeted that his team was “considering alternatives.”

Update: Twitter did change the @reply system, but it’s not a substantial change, nor does it reverse the controversial change made on Tuesday. From the Twitter blog:

…We’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

Considering most people reply to tweets by clicking on the reply button, those tweets will continue to remain invisible. Therefore, most of the tweets between your friends and the people they follow will continue to be omitted from your stream. The assumption is this will hold true for the reply buttons in the various external clients, as well.

The rest of Twitter’s response goes on to describe “a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow.” Stay tuned for that one, the team says it’ll take a while.

Image: Columbia Records

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TypePad Takes On Disqus, WordPress With New Distributed Comment System

By Scott Gilbertson November 21st, 2008 Categories: Blog Publishing, Software & Tools

typepad connect commentsSix Apart, makers of blogging platforms Movable Type and Typepad, have announced a new distributed blog comment system that offers a very simple way of integrating comments into any page.

Similar to services from Disqus and WordPress, the new TypePad Connect allows you embed comments in any page using JavaScript. Any user with a TypePad Connect profile can then comment on your page and you get a comment management dashboard that offers spam control, moderation and customization options.

Naturally any of your visitors that don’t have a Typepad account can still comment anonymously or use their own OpenID credentials to leave a comment. Other nice touches include the ability to post replies by e-mail and threaded comments (although the threading is only one level deep).

There are some custom code snippets available that make embedding Typepad comments in WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, Tumblr and other platforms, a simple cut-and-paste affair. Not using one of those systems? Not to worry, there’s generic JavaScript code that works on any site.

For those commenters that choose to use a TypePad account there’s also a new profile page, which will be linked back to via each commenter’s photo avatar.

If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Disqus you’re right. TypePad Connect offers many of the exact same features found in Disqus and similar distributed comments systems. In September, rival blog software maker WordPress acquired IntenseDebate, a platform for distributed comments complete with profiles, custom feeds and many features similar to Disqus and TypePad Connect. IntenseDebate will be rolled into the next version of WordPress, due soon, and is now available as a beta plug-in for WordPress users.

So which is better? In my limited testing I liked TypePad Connect and customizing the CSS to fit your site’s look and feel is easier than it is with Disqus. But Disqus offers some nice features like true WordPress integration (the ability to store posted comments in your WordPress database) and a very slick API for pulling out data and storing elsewhere.

In the end, if you’re already using Disqus or other services like WordPress’ new Intense Debate comment system, TypePad Connect probably won’t lure you away. But if you’ve never used either, give them both a look — both are very capable systems and offer some nice features that go far above and beyond what most blogging software offers out of the box.

Also be sure to check out the video on the new TypePad Connect site, which and shows the new commenting features in action.

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WordPress 2.7 in 63 Seconds

By Adam DuVander November 7th, 2008 Categories: Blog Publishing

The blogistas behind WordPress have created a short movie that quickly introduces the new interactive interface coming in with the next release of the blogging software. Embedded above, the movie shows the drag and drop dashboard and a post screen that can also have components rearranged.

Web developers and advanced bloggers may feel like a comic book fan dissecting the latest Spider-Man trailer, pausing and re-watching their favorite portions.

The dashboard is perhaps the biggest change. In early versions of WordPress the dashboard was mainly used to show the latest WordPress development news. Recently the team added a more modular dashboard and now it is completely customizable on-the-fly. With WordPress 2.7 you can even compose a post and reply to comments from the dashboard.

Want to see it in action on your own blog? It’s still in beta, but you can download the snazzy new version here.

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Tags: blogging, WordPress
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Top 5 Twitter Researching Tools

By Scott Loganbill October 17th, 2008 Categories: Blog Publishing, Software & Tools

I think we can all agree Twitter, and microblogging, is a real thing. It’s hip. It’s cool. All the kids are doing it. Who knew there would be so much activity in 140 characters?

In fact, Twitter has become a great tool for gathering information. From first hand accounts to general internet memes.

The best sign of Twitter’s popularity are the companies latching on to its success by building tools extending the services’ functionality. We’ve already gone over the top 8 tools for tweeting. Here are five of our favorite Twitter service-enhancing tools to help you navigate and make the most out of other people’s tweets.

  1. Tweetbeep.com — Give tweetbeep a keyword and the service will email you every time someone uses the word in a tweet. It’s Google Alerts for Twitter.
  2. Qwitter — When someone follows you on Twitter, you get an email to inflate your ego and give you a chance to follow them back. When someone quits following you on Twitter, the betrayal is hidden from you — that is, until you signs up for Qwitter. Qwitter will send you an email telling you who left you and for what offending tweet.
  3. Twitscoop — Twitscoop gives you a live tag cloud of what’s happening on Twitter. See words expand and shrink in real time. It’s particularly interesting to have on hand during big-time political events, like debates, when you’ll see “Joe The Plumber” grow irregularly large.
  4. Twellow — With so many big wigs, celebrities, friends and acquaintances on Twitter, sometimes it’s hard to know who to follow. Twellow allows you to search based on industry or topic and find people who are notable in the profession you have chosen. For example, you might be interested in Twellow’s web developer category.
  5. Twitter Search — Want to see what people are saying about a particular topic? Try Twitter’s search. Twitter search began as Summize before it was bought and integrated by Twitter in July of this year. It was a good match. Twitter’s search is particularly handy to gain the pulse of certain topics. For example, search for ‘earthquake’ after an earthquake and get live first-hand accounts — at least, by those still with an internet connection.

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Tags: Twitter
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PollDaddy Switches Into Automattic

By Adam DuVander October 15th, 2008 Categories: Blog Publishing

PollDaddy pollPollDaddy, the widget maker that lets bloggers add polls and surveys to their site, is now part of WordPress company Automattic. Founder Matt Mullenweg described looking around the web at similar products and compared PollDaddy to Wordpress itself:

“Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.”

PollDaddy burst onto the scene over two years ago. We first covered the tool at Widgets Live in 2006.

Automattic wasted no time integrating PollDaddy. It added a PollDaddy plugin with the company as author. Even bigger, it added an option for polls on Wordpress.com, the company’s hosted solution.

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Tags: blogging, WordPress
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