Web Design and more

Using the Socialize Me Wordpress Plugin

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I am using the Socialize Me wordpress plugin. What this plugin does is it displays a banner like the image above to visitors when they come to my site from sites such as twitter, facebook, digg, mybloglog, linkedin, ryze, and many more that I don’t use. It gives visitors a chance to interact with me on the platform that they just came from, say on StumbleUpon. It is a great way to use social networking to connect with the visitors of your site. Click the image above to me taken to the authors page for the plugin.

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Add a Footer to Your Blogs RSS Feed

I recently found this plugin for wordpress that adds ten areas for a blogger to add items to their feed. Bloggers can add in copyright information, text, even images. I am using it to promote other blogs and also for some advertising to see how that works over time. Previous posts do not get information added to their footer, only posts done after the plugin has been activated and configured. This is the first post with the feed activated so it will have an advertisement at the bottom of the feed.

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Simple Status Update in Twitter Using PHP

Here is a sample PHP snippet that will let a twitter user update their status using PHP code. I have it simply saying hello today is and the date. I’m thinking about running it from a cron script in an automated fashion in conjunction with another site that I run. To see the code I used click the more button unless you’re luckily enough to be sent to this post directly.

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eBay Transitioning Away From CJ for Affiliate Program

Bloggers or webmasters who make cash on their site by displaying ebay affiliate ads or live auctions will need to change their code by the end of April. eBay is moving their affiliate program in house. A cool site I have also found is shoppingads.com. ShoppingAds displays ebay auctions on a website using a snippet of javascript code. ShoppingAds will continue to work with the new eBay partner program so no changes will need to be made. To see a shoppingads.com ad go to this outdoor blog and see the Hot item listed under the sponsors section. For more information on shopping ads click on the ads by ShoppingAds link on the outdoors blog. Shopping Ads is easy to setup webmasters can give the search terms to use and pick from a variety of different ad sizes.

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More Ways to Share My Blog

Check out the sidebar on the left. You will see an ECO-SAFE badge. You can now click there and send the page you are viewing to yourself as HTML or as a PDF. You can also immediately download a PDF of the page. Not an original find, I read about it here.

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Sharing Items in Google Reader With the World

I use google reader http://www.google.com/reader to aggregate RSS feeds from blogs I read. I recently learned about “Sharing” a post I read. Within a post press “Control-Shift S” and the little Share text will light up. What makes this so cool? Well google gives me a page to share my shared items and they also give me a RSS feed for that page. I took the liberty of burning that feed over at feedburner so I can view stats on my shared items feed. I could not find any code that would display the feed correctly so I found this page that shows at the bottom how to use feedburners publicize tools to add the code in as javascript into my sidebar.php template. Javascript is not as cool to me as a plugin importing the RSS but it will have to do for now. Now you can subscribe to my shared items feed and also my latest shared items will be displayed on my home page.

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Google Checkout Does Not Like Godaddy SSL

I recently had to purchase a SSL certificate from another provider because Google checkout did not like the godaddy SSL certificate I installed. I just wanted to post this in case someone else is looking to use Google Checkout level 2 and was looking into buying a Godaddy cert.

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Branding: The favicon

A “favicon” is a small file that is shown in a users browser to the left of the URL. Mine is a green JR. See it up there? If not bookmark my site and your browser should show it in your favorites. The favicon is an easy way to increase your companies branding. Some logos are perfect for the small 16×16 pixels while other logos need to be “touched up”.

Portal Planet can help your company create a favicon for your business or blog. Favicons are usually a quick turnaround and are a great branding tool for your business.

If you are creative you can make your own 16×16 image, save it as a jpg and then create your own favicon by clicking here. After your icon is generated, save it to your computers hard drive and then upload it to the root of your website. Some say to add code to at least the index page but generally browsers will request this icon automatically.

Below are some favicons. Leave comments on which ones you recognize.

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Update on Google Checkout Fees

I saw this when I logged in to my Google Checkout account:

Beginning January 31, 2008, you’ll be charged a low 2% plus $0.20 per transaction. If you use Google AdWords, you can receive free credit card processing for some or all of your Checkout sales - just make sure you link your AdWords account to Checkout.

More info here: https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

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