Jon Bishop

How I Get The Most Out Of TweetDeck

Jon Bishop — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:21:20 +0000

As soon as the first Twitter clients allowed for multiple column views I was on board. I bounced between Seesmic, TweetDeck and HootSuite but always came back to TweetDeck. So while these clients can achieve similar functionality I will be talking about how I specifically use TweetDeck.

Managing Multiple Accounts

The main reason I started using TweetDeck was to manage multiple accounts. I use it to manage JonDBishop, SocialMediaComm, BostonWP, SocializeWP and a few others I use for testing.

The first column in my TweetDeck is my public stream for JonDBishop. I try to check this regularly because, well, that’s the point. Or at least that was my original intent. I’ve tried to keep the number of people I follow down to a reasonable number but it still becomes hard to manage. I just try to remember it’s there and from time to time I still engage in a conversation or click a link I find interesting.

Search Terms

My number one advice for people learning how to use Twitter is to learn how to use Twitter Search. There are terms you can add to your search query that filter your results based on location, sentiment, date and more.

You can also generalize sentiment and context pretty well with Twitter because of the way we progressed from texting and chat rooms to micro-blogging. As pointed out in “How to Use Advanced Twitter Search” you can use punctuation marks and emoticons to find people asking questions, complaining or falling in love.

I use all of this to create columns within TweetDeck that are extremely focused and service specific purposes.

For example, I have one column that looks for people looking for help with or talking about WordPress, WordPress plugins or WordPress themes.

(wp OR wordpress) (help OR need OR know OR plugin OR theme) -filter:links

To be honest, I used to use advanced search queries a lot more than I do currently in my day-to-day. There are still times where it comes in really handy like when you are participating in or going to events.

Twitter Lists

Most of my TweetDeck column are custom Twitter lists I’ve curated over time. The main benefit of lists is that you don’t have to deal with all the noise and spam from the public stream. The key is to continue to add and remove people as needed to keep your lists relevant.

I use about 8 lists in my TweetDeck and have another 8 I will swap in and out. My core ones consist of people I work with, friends and family. Then I have two lists for Boston; one for people I think are influential and one for news. Then I have a few lists for my different online and real life networks.

Publishing

When I’m not sorting through my different TweetDeck columns, I’m probably posting something … or working. I usually use Buffer to schedule posts but having the ability to schedule posts within TweetDeck is nice because the free version of Buffer only lets you work with one account.

Overall I will continue to use TweetDeck as my desktop client mostly because I’m familiar with it. Please share your favorite feature of your favorite client in the comments below.

Making Your Website Social

Jon Bishop — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:44:17 +0000

This post was written by Jon Bishop and Zac Champigny (Website, LinkedIn, Twitter). Zac is an Online Marketing Strategist with several years of experience working with online technologies. He recently spent 6 months in Medellin, Colombia expanding his knowledge of marketing, SEO, branding, social media, and business on the front lines of an up and coming website.

How Do You Make Your Website Social?

It’s a popular question with a not so straightforward answer. With everyone talking about social media, how can websites easily adopt online social technologies to increase engagement across their brand.

Start With a Social Media Presence

The easiest way to dive in is to get set up on popular social media sites. Start to foster a community off of your site so when you start to bring them in they will engage and share more.

Make sure you advertise your social accounts somewhere on your site at least displaying links to your social profiles on your contact page.

Maintain A Blog

Starting a blog can be a commitment but the return on investment can be great and there are plenty of excellent resources out there to get your started.

One of the benefits of having a blog is you are giving the world something to share and an opportunity to tell your brand’s story. Your blog centralizes your brand’s voice and becomes a home base for further engagement.

The additional engagement can come in the form of comments or trackbacks. Allowing consumers to engage with their brand at it’s heart is incredibly powerful and helps create lasting impressions. This is also an opportunity for the brand to engage back to further nurture relationships within the community.

Social Widgets

Most of the top social media sites make it really easy to get content from those sites onto your own website (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest). The important thing is to not go overboard and focus on the content your users will get the most use of.

Also, get creative. Displaying your Facebook posts in your sidebar doesn’t provide too much value. Displaying comments from a targeted Facebook campaign in place of testimonials can be a more impactful way of giving your reader added social proof.

Start a Forum

Forums may not be for every site, but they can be very handy resources. A forum can foster brand loyalty by offering support and customer service, as well as a place for a community to form.

They also provide a place for people to see what others are saying about a brand, how the brand interacts with customers, and to connect with others interested in that brand. A lot of people will have the same questions about your products or companies. By focusing them in one place Google can help other’s with the same questions find your site

Promote and Host Events

Social media is only another medium within the realm of social interaction. You are not limited to tweeting at people from afar. You can use these tools to leverage opportunities to meet people interested in your niche or brand in real life, creating lasting memories of shared value.

Start promoting and attending meetups, tweetups, webinars, conferences, lectures, and other social networking opportunities. Meetup.com could be a good place to start connecting.

Reviews

If you are a brick and mortar shop or selling a product, you should look into displaying user-generated reviews on your site. Conversations about your brand are already happening on sites like Yelp, Glassdoor and Google Reviews so you should at least be paying attention.

If you pride yourself in your good reviews, why not display them right on your site. They are real-time pieces of content about an experience that you can then share yourself back to your community.

RSS and Email Lists

RSS syndication allows for people to have whatever content you post sent to their personal readers. This let’s people stay current with what is going on with your site. Make sure they know this is an option to them.

Email lists allow you to send more direct messages to users that may be interested in more behind the scenes stuff, special offers, or extra interesting content. If you offer good value in a newsletter or use it as a way to connect with users, it may result in more brand loyalty and content sharing.

Wrap-up

It’s no question engaging users on multiple levels is a strategy that is going to bring you more long-term success when it comes to building relationships and loyalty to your brand or message. There are many options available to you, but the most important thing you can do is identify why you should be connecting and what you can contribute. It’s not enough to just put all of this stuff up on your site like a big net. You have to engage people and offer them value. Don’t just make a Facebook page, offer value on that page. Don’t just make an email list, give something to people that makes lending you their ear worth their time.

- Header image graphic by juaniraola

Creating Presentations With Custom Post Types

Jon Bishop — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 23:29:24 +0000

I wanted to come up with a cool way to showcase how powerful custom post types were for the Boston WordPress meetup. So I put together a quick little plugin that showcases:

Creating custom post types
Creating custom taxonomies
Creating custom labels for your custom post type
Creating contextual help for your custom post type
Using a custom template in a plugin for your custom post type
Sorting and displaying content in our custom post types in a unique way

What I came up with was a presentation plugin that uses Google’s html5slide template.

The Design

Our plugin will use a custom post type to hold the slides and a custom taxonomy to bind them all together. Our plugin will use a custom template that we will conditionally load when viewing a taxonomy archive. For usability sake, we will redirect individual links to slides to the appropriate slide within the presentation view.

Create Our Custom Post Types

We’ll begin our plugin with our custom post type to hold our slides.

function cptslides_init() {
    $labels = array(
        'name' => 'Slides',
        'singular_name' => 'Slide',
        'add_new' => 'Add New', 'slide',
        'add_new_item' => 'Add New Slide',
        'edit_item' => 'Edit Slide',
        'new_item' => 'New Slide',
        'all_items' => 'All Slides',
        'view_item' => 'View Slide',
        'search_items' => 'Search Slides',
        'not_found' => 'No slides found',
        'not_found_in_trash' => 'No slides found in Trash',
        'parent_item_colon' => '',
        'menu_name' => 'Slides'
    );
    $args = array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'show_in_menu' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'rewrite' => true,
        'capability_type' => 'post',
        'has_archive' => true,
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'menu_position' => null,
        'supports' => array('title', 'editor', 'author', 'page-attributes')
    );

    register_post_type('cptslides', $args);
}
add_action('init', 'cptslides_init');

This creates a custom post type named Slides. Notice within register_post_type(), we prefixed our custom post type with ‘cpt’. This is so our custom post type plugin doesn’t conflict with other plugins that might create a ‘slide’ custom post type.

We also set up the appropriate labels for our custom post type and passed them in to to register_post_type() via the $args array.

Another key in $args lets us tell WordPress which features our custom post type supports. For our plugin, our slides will need a title, some content, an author and page attributes so we can sort our slides.

For good measure, let’s also create some custom admin messages for our custom post type.

function cptslides_updated_messages($messages) {
    global $post, $post_ID;

    $messages['cptslides'] = array(
        0 => '', // Unused. Messages start at index 1.
        1 => sprintf(__('Slide updated. View slide in presentation'), esc_url(get_permalink($post_ID))),
        2 => __('Custom field updated.'),
        3 => __('Custom field deleted.'),
        4 => __('Slide updated.'),
        5 => isset($_GET['revision']) ? sprintf(__('Slide restored to revision from %s'), wp_post_revision_title((int) $_GET['revision'], false)) : false,
        6 => sprintf(__('Slide published. View slide in presentation'), esc_url(get_permalink($post_ID))),
        7 => __('Slide saved.'),
        8 => sprintf(__('Slide submitted. Preview presentation'), esc_url(add_query_arg('preview', 'true', get_permalink($post_ID)))),
        9 => sprintf(__('Slide scheduled for: %1$s. Preview presentation'), date_i18n(__('M j, Y @ G:i'), strtotime($post->post_date)), esc_url(get_permalink($post_ID))),
        10 => sprintf(__('Slide draft updated. Preview presentation'), esc_url(add_query_arg('preview', 'true', get_permalink($post_ID)))),
    );
    return $messages;
}
add_filter('post_updated_messages', 'cptslides_updated_messages');

Create Presentation Taxonomy

Now we can create slides with WordPress for our presentation plugin but we need a way to group slides together into individual presentations. For this we will create a custom taxonomy.

function create_cptslides_taxonomies() {
    // Add new taxonomy, make it hierarchical (like categories)
    $labels = array(
        'name' => _x('Presentations', 'taxonomy general name'),
        'singular_name' => _x('Presentation', 'taxonomy singular name'),
        'search_items' => __('Search Presentations'),
        'all_items' => __('All Presentations'),
        'parent_item' => __('Parent Presentation'),
        'parent_item_colon' => __('Parent Presentation:'),
        'edit_item' => __('Edit Presentation'),
        'update_item' => __('Update Presentation'),
        'add_new_item' => __('Add New Presentation'),
        'new_item_name' => __('New Presentation Name'),
        'menu_name' => __('Presentations'),
    );

    register_taxonomy('cptslides_presentation', array('cptslides'), array(
        'hierarchical' => true,
        'labels' => $labels,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'presentation'),
    ));
}
add_action('init', 'create_cptslides_taxonomies', 0);

Same as with our custom post type, we prefix our custom taxonomy so it won’t conflict with other taxonomies called ‘presentation’.

Add Contextual Help For Our Custom Post Type

Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine, but I strongly believe if a plugin adds functionality to the WordPress admin, it should provide contextual help that describes how to use that functionality. It’s really easy to do and ultimately creates a better user experience.

function cptslides_help_text($contextual_help, $screen_id, $screen) {
    //$contextual_help .= $screen_id; // use this to help determine $screen->id
    if ('cptslides' == $screen->id) {
        $contextual_help =
                '' . __('Things to remember when creating custom post types:') . '' .
                '' .
                '' . __('It is better if you prefix your name with a short "namespace" that identifies your plugin, theme or website that implements the custom post type.') . '' .
                '' . __('Custom post types have little to do with blog posts and are better classified as custom content types.') . '' .
                '' . __('Remember you can change the labels and messaging on your custom post as well as the contextual help (this).') . '';
    } elseif ('edit-cptslides' == $screen->id) {
        $contextual_help =
                '' . __('These slides are all part of individual presentations grouped by taxonomies.') . '';
    } else if ('edit-cptslides_presentation'  == $screen->id) {

        
    }
    return $contextual_help;
}
add_action('contextual_help', 'cptslides_help_text', 10, 3);

Add Custom Columns To Custom Post Type List

Managing our slides from our new custom post type post list can become cumbersome to manage as the number of slides increase. Something I try to do with all of my custom post types is to tailor the columns to better fit the post types purpose. In this case we should probably add the presentation name and the order within the presentation as columns on our slide list.

// Set up our column headers
function cptslides_edit_columns($columns) {
    $columns = array(
        "cb" => "",
        "title" => "Title",
        "presentation" => "Presentation",
        "order" => "Order",
        "author" => "Author",
        "date" => "Date"
    );

    return $columns;
}

// Output data under new column headers
function cptslides_custom_columns($column) {
    global $post;

    switch ($column) {
        case "order":
            if (isset($post->menu_order)) {
                echo $post->menu_order;
            } else {
                echo 0;
            }
            break;
        case "presentation":
            $presentation = get_the_term_list($post->ID, 'cptslides_presentation', '', '', '');
            echo $presentation;
            break;
    }
}

// Modify orderby query to order by our new data
function cptslides_column_orderby($orderby, $wp_query) {
    global $wpdb;

    $wp_query->query = wp_parse_args($wp_query->query);
    if (isset($wp_query->query['orderby'])) {
        if ('order' == @$wp_query->query['orderby'])
            $orderby = "menu_order " . $wp_query->get('order');
    }
    return $orderby;
}

// More complex orderby query to order by taxonomy
// Adapted from: http://scribu.net/wordpress/sortable-taxonomy-columns.html
function cptslides_position_clauses($clauses, $wp_query) {
    global $wpdb;

    if (isset($wp_query->query['orderby']) && 'presentation' == $wp_query->query['orderby']) {

        $clauses['join'] .= <posts}.ID={$wpdb->term_relationships}.object_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN {$wpdb->term_taxonomy} USING (term_taxonomy_id)
LEFT OUTER JOIN {$wpdb->terms} USING (term_id)
SQL;

        $clauses['where'] .= " AND (taxonomy = 'cptslides_presentation' OR taxonomy IS NULL)";
        $clauses['groupby'] = "object_id";
        $clauses['orderby'] = "GROUP_CONCAT({$wpdb->terms}.name ORDER BY name ASC) ";
        $clauses['orderby'] .= ( 'ASC' == strtoupper($wp_query->get('order')) ) ? 'ASC' : 'DESC';
    }
    return $clauses;
}

// Register our new table headers so they are clickable
function cptslides_column_register_sortable($columns) {
    $columns['presentation'] = 'presentation';
    $columns['order'] = 'order';
    return $columns;
}
add_filter('manage_edit-cptslides_sortable_columns', 'cptslides_column_register_sortable');
add_filter('posts_orderby', 'cptslides_column_orderby', 10, 2);
add_filter('posts_clauses', 'cptslides_position_clauses', 10, 2);
add_action("manage_posts_custom_column", "cptslides_custom_columns");
add_filter("manage_edit-cptslides_columns", "cptslides_edit_columns");

There’s a lot going on here, so I’ll break it down by function/filter.

The cptslides_edit_columns function in the manage_edit-cptslides_columns filter sets up our columns and their respective headers.

The cptslides_custom_columns function in the manage_posts_custom_column filter displays our custom column data for each slide. In this case we are making use of the built in menu_order page attribute to sort our slides within our presentations so we can just grab that from the global $post variable. For our custom taxonomy, we just grab the terms from the current post.

Up to this point our columns exist but aren’t sortable. The cptslides_column_register_sortable function in the manage_edit-cptslides_sortable_columns filter basically tells WordPress our column headers for our custom columns should be clickable. Just because they’re clickable, doesn’t mean we can sort anything yet.

The posts_orderby function in the cptslides_column_orderby filter makes our ‘Order’ column sortable. Basically it checks to see what the post list is currently being sorted by, and if it’s being sorted by order, we modify the query for the post list and order by our built in order page attribute.

Sorting custom taxonomies are a bit trickier because they are not inherently part of the query that generates our custom post list. The cptslides_position_clauses function in the posts_clauses filter solves that problem by creating joins on the term tables, grouping and ordering the results. The original author of this bit of code is Silviu-Cristian Burca (source).

Use A Custom Template For Our Custom Post Type

The great thing about custom post types is WordPress can automatically display your content without having to create a custom template. However, WordPress added support for single-type-templates in WP 3.0 and for archive-type-templates in WP 3.1. This allows you to easily create custom templates for your custom post types without any additional coding in our plugin.

But what if you wan’t your template to live within your plugin so it can be moved around independent of your theme? Fortunately this is also pretty easy with the template_include filter.

function cptslides_template($template) {
    global $post;
    if ($post->post_type == 'cptslides') {
        return CPTSLIDES_PATH . 'template.php';
    }
    return $template;
}

add_filter('template_include', 'cptslides_template', 1, 1);

All this does is check to see if we are currently in a taxonomy or single page from our custom post type and pass in our custom template if we are.

The custom template in this case is a single file with the html5slides template code. All I’ve done is swapped in the existing content with the WordPress loop. I also use some query_posts() to modify the loop to display all slides within an archive and sort by menu_order.

Now when we view a presentation archive, we get a completed presentation with all of the slides loaded in the proper order.

Redirect Our Custom Post Type To A Taxonomy

At this point the plugin is pretty much done except for one pesky usability problem for the admin. If the admin tries to view a single slide, we see that slide outside of the context of the presentation. The ideal functionality would be to have that slide take you to that slide within the presentation. Because our plugin is using the html5slides library, we can just redirect the user to the presentation and append a number sign with our slide number to the URL so the presentation automatically jumps to the appropriate slide.

To do this, we hook in to the template_redirect filter.

function cptslides_redirect() {
    global $post;
    // Instead of accessing slides directly, redirect to archive and focus on requested slide
    if (get_post_type() == 'cptslides' && !is_tax()) {
        // Find the slide's presentation link
        $terms = get_the_terms($post->ID, 'cptslides_presentation');
        foreach ($terms as $term) {
            $term_link = get_tag_link($term);
            break;
        }
        // Loop through slides to find the requested slides order in the presentation
        $counter = 1;
        $post_id = $post->ID;
        $args = array(
            'orderby' => 'menu_order',
            'order' => 'ASC',
            'posts_per_page' => -1,
            'cptslides_presentation' => 'custom-post-types',
            'post_status' => 'publish'
        );
        $query = new WP_Query($args);
        if ($query->have_posts())
            while ($query->have_posts()): $query->the_post();
                $counter++;
                if ($post_id == $post->ID) {
                    $term_link .= '#' . $counter;
                    break;
                }
            endwhile;
        // Go to the presentation
        wp_redirect($term_link);
        die();
    }
}

add_action('template_redirect', 'cptslides_redirect');

Once again there are a couple things going on here.

First we check to see if we are trying to load an individual slide
Next we grab the URL for the presentation the slide lives in.
Then we count through all slides in the presentation until we find the slide we were trying to visit
Once we know the slide, we redirect the user to the slide within the presentation
Now we can edit slides within WordPress and then jump directly to that slide within the presentation with no extra clicking around.

Finished Code

You can grab the finished Custom Post Type Slides code off of GitHub. Feel free to fork it and make it your own or leave your own ideas for the plugin in the comments.

Here is a working example of the plugin that I used to give the original presentation. You can watch the video from the presentation on BostonWP.org.

Why You Should Check Out Your Local WordPress Meetup

Jon Bishop — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 13:28:01 +0000

I recently joined Kurt Eng as an organizer of the Boston WordPress Meetup. I also got to help organize and run this past Boston WordCamp. I’m pretty excited because I love the meetups as they are and I looking forward to contributing any way I can. If you haven’t been to a WordPress meetup yet I wanted share why you should care and why you should be attending.

Keeping Up With WordPress

A few months ago, I wrote a post discussing all the ways I keep up with developments in the WordPress community. Stephen Kane from the Orange County WordPress Meetup reached out to say he had shared the post at his own meetup. The great thing about attending monthly WordPress meetups is the collective knowledge of all things happening with WordPress so you don’t have to spend too much time trying to stay on top of what’s new. Everyone brings something new to the table and who better to learn from than each other.

Learn Something New

The great thing about these meetups is they adapt to meet the needs of the people who attend them. If you have a bunch of developers attending the meetup then you’re likely to get a good session about WordPress development. If there’s a healthy mix of developers and beginners then some meetups might do what we do at the Boston WordPress Meetup and split the session up into two rooms. Every topic is different from the last and attendees can recommend new topics through Meetup.com.

Meet Great People

Us WordPress folks are just great people all around. The type of people who attend these meetups are open to learning and meeting new people. There’s an awesome spirit of giving and camaraderie in the WordPress community that you can easily see at WordCamps and meetups.

Great Networking

Whether you’re a developer looking to pick up some extra work, or someone with an idea looking to hire a good developer. Maybe you’re a developer that just wants to meet other developers. WordPress meetups attract a very diverse audience with varying experience levels and needs. There’s some real talent in this space, especially here in Boston.

Get Your WordPress Questions Answered

I see a good number of developers and general users helping each other with their WordPress problems. Some meetups try to slot in some Q&A time where you can basically ask your question to the entire room. Maybe you can even recommend a topic for a future meetup that might answer your question. Ultimately, WordPress meetups are an excellent source to get help with WordPress.

Because It’s The Year Of The Meetup

Back in January, Jane Wells announced:

We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action.

- Year Of The Meetup

This basically means you can expect to see more meetups popping up around the country that will have access to better resources.

Why Do I Do It?

I just love having that time, once a month, where I get to geek out about something I’m passionate about. I love the people who come to the events and the friends I’ve made that keep coming back. It’s an awesome community that I’ve learned a lot from. I hope to keep learning and try to giving back whenever I get a chance.

Getting The Most Out Of Your RSS Reader: Finding The Most Relevant Content

Jon Bishop — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:50:34 +0000

As I explained in my last post, I’ve got about an hour before I get to work where I need to consume as much content as possible. Ideally I would like to get to the good stuff as quick as I can.

I’m going to share a few ways I make the most out of my time on the T in hopes that it can help you.

Using TweetMeme

If you don’t know TweetMeme yet, they made a name for themselves by aggregating all of the most popular links on Twitter. Later iterations of the site organized links by category so you can see all popular links within a topic. Each category has its own RSS feed however all the links in the feed direct you to a TweetMeme summary of that link. You also don’t have access to the full text of the post. This makes TweetMeme a hard source to work with, but with Yahoo Pipes and some tricks we learned in the last post we can make magic happen.

First you need to find a good feed from TweetMeme that has the stuff we want. The main TweetMeme feed is usually diluted with celebrity pics and spammy marketing ploys. There’s usually some pretty good stuff in some of the categories off of the main page. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, they have custom curated channels with more specific topics. Once you find a channel or category you like, grab the RSS feed.

Once you have a good TweetMeme feed you will need to run your feed through Yahoo Pipes to replace the link in the feed with the link to the post itself. Once we have our new feed we can run it through the fulltextrssfeed service and our new feed is ready to go.

Using Reddit

Reddit is one of the largest and most influential communities on the internet because of its strong community and organic ranking system. One does not simply browse Reddit for a few minutes because there is so much awesome content. A little trick I learned awhile back can make it extremely useful in our goal to aggregate as much awesome content as possible.

Reddit is broken down into community moderated subreddits about different topics. Find a bunch of subreddits relevent to your topic and mash them up to create a single multi-reddit. For my own purposes I’ve mashed up the following subreddits:

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev

http://www.reddit.com/r/php

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design

http://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting

http://www.reddit.com/r/wordpress

http://www.reddit.com/r/html

into this single multireddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev+php+web_design+webhosting+wordpress+html

Subscribing to the RSS feed of this multireddit consolidates all of this awesome information into one feed I can easily digest on my way into work. Fantastic.

Rince and Repeat

I use these same methods to subscribe to other aggregation sites like Hackernews, newsvine, topix etc. Different sites provide different types of data so you might need to play with Yahoo Pipes and fulltextrssfeed to get the full posts. Also experiment with sorting by date and popularity before subscribing to the RSS feeds. The goal is to find the best content before everyone else.

Getting The Most Out Of Your RSS Reader: Full Posts Instead Of Summaries

Jon Bishop — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:32:39 +0000

Keeping up with all of your favorite blogs and news sites can be time-consuming. There are new blogs with amazing content popping up every day and it can get very hard to keep track of them all. Most people subscribe to the RSS feeds of their favorite sites so they can read them all in an RSS feed reader like Google Reader. This works great for the most part except some sites don’t offer up the entire posts in their feeds.

Why would someone do such a thing?

Sites usually display summaries in their feeds in hopes that you will click-through to their website. They do this to increase their page views, get more ad impressions, increase time on site, etc. So there are actually some pretty good reasons to do this.

My problem with it is I do most of my reading on the T on my way to work. The train I ride every morning spends a third of its time above ground and the rest under the streets of Boston where my phone loses service. So it doesn’t matter how compelling or awesome your summary is, I can’t click-through to your website because I physically can’t.

How to fix the problem

There are a few ways to go about it however the easiest by far is Full Text RSS Feed Builder. It basically takes a feed and replaces summaries with full posts.

Unfortunately, not all websites are created equal. How you go about abstracting full text from one site can be different on other sites. That’s where a slightly more powerful tool called Yahoo Pipes can help. With Yahoo Pipes there’s a bit of a learning curve but you ultimately have more control over the final product. To help, here is a list of Pipes that can help get you started creating feeds sans their summaries.

If you are using Google Reader in chrome you can download Super Full Feeds for Google Reader to enable full contents feeds.

So now you never have to leave your RSS reader. Next time we’ll look at how you can create optimized, more targeted feeds to get better more relevant content in your RSS reader.

Image by dayvidday

Keeping Up With WordPress

Jon Bishop — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:48:08 +0000

There are tons of ways to keep up with developments in the WordPress community. In this post I wanted to share some of my favorite sources of information when it comes to WordPress.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll notice I retweet these sites regularly and that’s because they put out great content in a timely fashion. I’ve also been mixing it up lately with podcasts and IRC so I’ve included them in this list as well.

Finally, at the end of this post I share some additional resources as well as a Google Reader bundle of all the WordPress blogs I try to follow.

WordPress News

WordPress planet

WordPress planetis an aggregation of blogs talking about WordPress from around the world. It is composed mostly of the blogs of core developers and is your best source for official WordPress news.

WordPress VIP news

WordPress VIP news is aimed at helping publishers and brands get the most out of WordPress. It’s a great way to find out about new plugins and see how others are using WordPress.

WP Candy

WP Candy is an excellent source of news from all around the WordPress community. Their team does a great job covering everything from new releases to major announcements.

WPMU.org

WPMU.org is another great news source with an excellent team. They have new posts daily and feature WordPress news, tips, plugins theme reviews and more.

WordPress Tavern

WordPress Tavern has been one of my go to sources for news about the WordPress community since I started paying attention to this kind of stuff. They regularly post reviews, news, screencasts, guest blog posts and more.

Weblog Tools Collection

Weblog Tools Collection can be followed through the WordPress planet feed or through its own RSS feed but is an easy way to keep up to date on major plugin and theme updates as well as news from within the community.

WordPress Forums

The WordPress forum

The WordPress forum is active with all types of WordPress users. It’s the first place you should look when troubleshooting a plugin, theme or just trying to learn a bit more about WordPress.

WordPress Tavern

WordPress Tavern is the only other WordPress forum I bother to check out besides the official forum. The forum generates some great discussions and is an excellent way to tap into global knowledge of the WordPress community.

WordPress Podcasts & Streams

WordPress Candy

WordPress Candy has an excellent selection of WordPress podcasts and streams. There is new content pretty regularly and the podcasts range from short little tips to in depth interviews.

The WordPress Community podcast

The WordPress Community podcast features Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes, two individuals who are very active within the WordPress community. The podcast has some great interviews and excellent advice for all types of WordPress users.

WordCast

WordCast is currently on temporary hiatus but promises to be another great source of WordPress podcasts upon their return.

WordPress Videos

WordPress.tv

WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress. Packed with hundreds of WordCamp talks and how-tos it’s a great way to step up your WordPress game.

LiveWP.tv

LiveWP.tv is similar to some of the podcasts I follow except it is video and you can attend the tapings live assuming you can track one down.

WordPress Chat

WordPress IRC

WordPress has several IRC channels that provide an easy means of getting help with WordPress. There are over 400 people in #wordpress as of the time this was written. You can also follow along with the core teams weekly meetings on #wordpress-dev.

WordPress Tutorial Sites

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine does a great job of regularly putting out high quality WordPress tutorials and is an overall excellent resource for web developers/designers.

WP Tuts

WP Tuts is another excellent resource for high quality WordPress training and tutorials. I personally feel Smashing Magazine has higher quality articles but WP Tuts has good quality more often.

WPMU.org

WPMU.org regularly features tutorials and tips to help you get the most out of WordPress and is a great place to learn something new.

WordPress Local

WordCamps

WordCamps happen all around the world and feature talks from all types of folks from within the WordPress community. It’s the best place to learn more about WordPress and meet other WordPress developers, designers and users.

WordPress meetups

WordPress meetups happen all over the world and more often than WordCamps which make them the second best way to meet other WordPress folks and learn more about WordPress. This year has been dubbed the “Year of the Meetup” by the WordPress foundation. Boston area WordPress users should check out our monthly WordPress meetup.

WordPress Newsletter

wpMail

wpMail is a free WordPress Newsletter, once a week, with a round-up of WordPress news and articles. The newsletter gets straight to the content making it an easy way to keep up to date on all things WordPress.

Bonus

This is a feed of 41 WordPress sites I check daily through Google Reader. I’ve bundled it up for you to make it easy. Grab the feed here.

If 41 WordPress sites isn’t enough, check out this post from WPCandy with a link to 240 RSS feeds you can follow.

Image by Puzzler4879

How To Make Social Sharing Buttons Display Faster and Measure Their Effectiveness

Jon Bishop — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:20:26 +0000

As a follow up to “Which Bookmarking & Sharing Buttons Should I Display On My Site“, I wanted to talk a bit about how to make those buttons display faster and how to measure their effectiveness. This is my first blog post at my new job and I wanted to share it with my readers here.

Read Getting The Most Out Of Your Sharing Buttons now.

Getting Ready For Social Media in 2012

Jon Bishop — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:26:35 +0000

I attended an AMA event a few weeks ago where Tomeeka Farrington spoke about The Future of Social Media. As we continue to scratch the surface of how the internet can enable us to connect and share with others around the world it’s important to continue to innovate and expand upon these ideas to make them better.

Here are some highlights from the presentation and some thoughts of my own on what to expect in marketing and social media in 2012.

Optimize For Mobile

More and more people are using their mobile devices to browse the web. The biggest thing you can do to get ready for social media in 2012 is to establish your mobile presence. Some stats from a recent ComScore study show:

More than 70% of users who use mobile social media use it daily
As of March 2011, there’s been a 45% growth in mobile social media usage since last year

One way to make your site more mobile friendly is to provide an alternative site for viewing on mobile devices. WordPress users can download a plugin like WPTouch and be up and running on their smartphone easily. More recently sites have been experimenting with responsive web design that basically eliminate the need for multiple versions of your site by creating one version that adapts to fit the current screen size. It’s important to at least be aware of your site’s mobile usability as traffic to and from social media continues to increase.

Provide Mobile Offers and Incentives

As more advertisers turn to mobile it’s important to keep up to date with the most recent developments to drive better traffic. The ability to target ads based on location is getting easier and shows great promise for the future. WHERE had some interesting statistics in the ComScore study mentioned earlier. The study says:

40% of consumers who click a location dynamic ad show purchase intent while 30% will go on to share the ad in their social networks.

Here is a list of mobile advertising networks from mobiThinking to get you started.

Another way to advertise is through offers on sites like Foursquare and Groupon. This attracts a more tech savvy crowd which is in turn more likely to share or review your service through social media. Be careful however as new data suggests these offers could potentially generate negative reviews as well.

More QR Codes and Some NFC

You may have heard of QR codes by now but did you know “About two-thirds of US respondents have seen a QR code. Of those surveyed, about half who saw a QR code, used it” - Heidi Cohen. I personally think most of its usage stems from mere curiosity but the idea behind it is important as newer technologies emerge. Near Field Communication (NFC) although limited in availability is easier to use and has much more potential if it takes off. This provides new advertising opportunities as we can target ads based off location and previous purchase history. Google already has one Android phone using NFC and will soon add another. Expect to see new creative uses of QR codes and a rise in NFC usage.

Collaboration Is Key To Innovation

Businesses already recognize the importance of monitoring social media and using it as a means of interacting with their community. Social media provides a greater opportunity to collaborate with communities to further innovate. Collaborative innovation embraces diversity and enables motivated individuals within the community to contribute in ways that were once not possible due to location, language and accessibly limitations. Expect to see a growth in collaboration tools emerging that will improve upon written, audio and visual communication as well as the organization and development of ideas and resources.

Automation

With the number of public APIs increasing and new APIs popping up from popular social media sites expect easier ways to use them. Sites like Ifttt.com and Yahoo Pipes put the power of public APIs from sites like Twitter, Yahoo, Google and Facebook in to easy to use interfaces. Expect to see more innovation around the automation of network management and content distribution.

Personal Network Integration

We need to start changing the way we think about our social media networks. My smartphone has essentially decentralized my contacts from their respective networks and recompiled them into one list. Instead of searching across multiple networks I can now instantly find the best way to contact anyone in any of my networks in seconds right from my phone.

But it’s not just about the centralization of our networks. A growing number of social media sites allow users to use their site as an authentication method for other services. Not only can you use these sites to assist in the registration process but you have access to most of the data for that user. This in turn allows you to leverage their existing networks and make the user experience more targeted to their interests.

Redefining What’s Relevant

An amazing Ted Talk by Eli Pariser opened my eyes to the problems of Facebook and Google filtering content based on usage. Eli goes on to say that by only displaying what’s relevant we create “filter bubbles” or we only see what Google and Facebook think we want to see. We don’t necessarily see the things that challenge our beliefs and make us uncomfortable but these are the things that help us grow and evolve into better people. I expect this will change as new services, and changes in existing ones, work harder to get more relevant content to us.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to be excited about for the future of marketing and social media. Social media enables those with something to say and good ideas spread faster than ever. Keep an eye on emerging mobile technologies and be willing to embrace change and innovation.

Automating The Internet With ifttt

Jon Bishop — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:33:31 +0000

A relatively new site has peaked my interest called ifttt (If This Than That). I never really fully embraced a social media automation tool until now. What really sets this site apart from the rest is the amount of power it puts in the hands of normal internet users that previously had few ways to interact with the growing number of public social media APIs out there. This mixed in with some ifttt tools to allow you to send text messages, set timers and even convert voicemails to text makes ifttt my new favorite productivity tool.

How Does It Work?

The site provides an easy to use interface that allows you to create triggers and actions to automate repetitive tasks.

The site goes beyond the traditional “send all of my posts to Twitter” type of automation to allow you to create tasks that interact with a whole variety of services. So beyond sending all of your posts to Twitter, which you can easily do, you can send your posts to Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and more. But it’s not just about automating RSS feeds, the real power is in the interaction between other services. Sending tweets with a hashtag to Delicious or uploading new Flickr images to Facebook.

So What Can This Cool New Tool Do?

Besides being able to do what other automation tools can already do, ifttt currently allows you to interact with 36 other services with some really amazing potential. Here are some of my favorite Tasks I’ve created so far.

Send Starred Posts In Google Reader To Twitter

This task allows you to easily send any posts you star in Google Reader as links to twitter. You can then go into the ifttt settings to sign in with your Bitly account to easily track those links.

Leave A Voicemail To Create New Google Calendar Events

This is my favorite recipe I’ve created so far. Basically I just call a phone number provided by ifttt and leave voicemails with new events like “Meet Joe at Starbucks at noon tomorrow”. I’m always looking for easier ways to interact with my calendar so this has been an awesome bit of functionality.

Send My Featured Images From Posts In WordPress To Flickr

I’ve been wanting to organize all of the featured images I create for my posts in Flickr but just never got around to it. Now there’s no need and my hard work can go on display in Flickr with a link back to my post automatically.

Some Other Great Recipes

Scratching The Surface Of Free And Easy To Use Automation Tools

I imagine I’ll find other cool uses for ifttt as they continue to add new channels. The simplicity of the site and use of recipes to share task templates should drive the service pretty far. They have laid the groundwork to become one of the most powerful free social media automation tools on the internet and I’m excited to see where it goes.

New To Twitter? Learn Who To Follow

Jon Bishop — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:50:47 +0000

My girlfriend just joined Twitter and I find myself trying to explain how to get Twitter followers. When I joined Twitter a few years ago everybody followed pretty much everyone who followed them. There wasn’t much spam yet so it was a safe bet you were following someone who you could potentially hold a little Twitter conversation with.

Three years later a lot has changed but there are still many ways to find some good people follow.

Find Tweeps You Know In Real Life

The first thing you should do is follow people you are already friends with. Twitter makes it easy by allowing you to import from Gmail, LinkedIn and a few other services. Learn more here.

Find Local Tweeps

Using Twitter Search to find local Twitter users is easy. You just use the near and within search operators. So to find all Twitter users tweeting within 5 miles of Boston you would just search for near:Boston, MA within:5mi.

A few other services that make it easy to find local Tweeps:

Here’s a great article written for businesses looking for local tweeps but it’s certainly relevant for us normal tweeters too.

Find Tweeps With Similar Interests

Anther useful feature Twitter provides is the ability to find popular users by interest.

Some services that help find like minded Tweeps include:

Finding Tweeps in Lists

One of my favorite additions to Twitter during it’s rise to popularity was Twitter Lists. What I was most interested in at first was how other people classified me. Beyond being a good measurement of how others perceive you it’s a great tool to find others just like you. For example I’m listed in several WordPress Twitter lists so there’s a good chance the other people in that lists would be good candidates for me to follow.

If finding new lists becomes a challenge you should sign up and check out Listorious, a directory for Twitter lists.

Quality Quality Quality

You can follow people for days until you reach your Twitter limits but what’s the point if no one is talking to you. A few things I look at before following are the basics; a profile pic, a bio and a link to their website. Then I go on to see if they are only talking about themselves or if they actually retweet and communicate with others. Spam and bots are pretty easy to spot once you start recognizing the patterns.

Follow Us and Say Hi/Welcome

Finally be sure to follow myself (@JonDBishop) and my girlfriend Kelley (@monkelley) to say hi. We try to be friendly and talk/help others the best we can. Kelley will especially appreciate your follows and tweets as a distraction from her most recent adventure that is grad school.

WordPress and Shortcodes

Jon Bishop — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:39:12 +0000

I gave a talk the other night at the Boston WordPress meetup about how I use shortcodes to enable my clients to create better looking content. A problem I was having was people were paying me to set them up on WordPress so they can take control of their content and then they were paying me even more to edit the content for them to “make it look pretty”. I guess if you need the business this isn’t a problem but I like to avoid small jobs, like manipulating content, so I can focus on my bigger projects and plugin support.

Pros and Cons of WordPress Shortcodes

Themes vs Plugins

The most popular implementation is currently in premium WordPress themes as a means of creating better looking content that matches the look and feel of the rest of the site. The problem then becomes you are tied to that theme if a majority of your site is relying on theme shortcodes to lay out your content. This won’t be a problem if you plan on rewriting your content but definitely something worth keeping in mind. It’s best to take functionality out of your theme you would like to be theme independent and put it in a functionality plugin.

My problem with using formatting shortcodes in a plugin as opposed to a theme is your content is less likely to match the look and feel of the rest of the site. That’s not to say their aren’t some great solutions out there and ultimately using a plugin will keep your content theme independent.

Usability

One of the obvious problems with shortcodes is if you’re taking the time to learn them, you can probably just learn HTML and CSS. I find this is true in most cases but not all. A shortcode is still easier to to use if you find the Visual/HTML editor confusing. You also don’t have to muck around with CSS.

One thing I think helps tremendously is the presence of a user interface to assist in the creation of the shortcodes. Most of the time this is in the form of a button on the visual editor that provides a popup with more options. There is no standard implementation of this so you won’t always have the luxury. More important is you now know it’s possible and can keep an eye out for how themes approach this problem. Most premium themes in ThemeForest do a good job of this.

Speed

If you don’t have to use shortcodes, just don’t use them. We’re talking milliseconds here in most cases so it really doesn’t matter too much. One problem with shortcodes is you cannot detect if a shortcode is being used in your content from your header so you can conditionally load javascript. You can however conditionally load javascript in the footer but it can be kind of a hack.

Resources

Code Snippets

Advanced Development

Plugins & Themes

Slides from Boston WordPress Meetup

I used the [slideshare] shortcode to display the slides!

Come to Boston WordCamp

I’ll be speaking more about shortcodes again at Boston WordCamp so be sure to go and sign up. I’ll be showing different examples of how businesses can use shortcodes to create better looking content. There are a bunch of other great speakers with some very interesting topics lined up. It’s sure to be a great time and an awesome place to get brushed up on all the latest WordPress tips and tricks.

Which Bookmarking & Sharing Buttons Should I Display On My Site

Jon Bishop — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:57:51 +0000

As search results give more weight to social factors it’s more important than ever to make your content easy to share on the internet. A recent study by ShareThis in cooperation with Starcom MediaVest Group and Rubinson Partners shows 31% of website referrals are from the “sharing” of your content. The study also shows that people are more likely to share something to a specific social media site based on the type of content it is.

What Are Your Options?

Google +1

The Google +1 button essentially socializes your search results and keeps tabs of your personal +1′s on your Google profile. If you needed proof of social signals affecting search results this is it. A link in your search engine results will get a little boost if someone you know +1′d that link or if a large part of the general population +1′d that link.

This button is still pretty new but you will certainly see it often. This is Google’s direct answer to the Facebook Like button so expect to see the two together.

Facebook Like

Facebook has changed the way you share content a few times however the Facebook Like button is their most recent toy. It makes use of the open graph to identify and connect your liked content to Facebook pages, activities, music, movies, etc.

From the AOL/Nielsen Content Sharing study, we know people prefer to share content with friends and family. That makes Facebook an important place to make your content easily shareable on. Make sure to make use of the open graph to fine tune how your content is shared and to claim your stake in the open graph.

Twitter Retweet

Twitter didn’t always have it’s own retweet button. In the beginning there was TweetMeme. A few tried to copy what Tweetmeme had created however only BackType and Topsy succeeded where others failed. Finally Twitter released it’s own button that gives you the option of choosing a Twitter profile to recommend after a user shares your content. Each retweet button has it’s perks but make sure you display one on your site.

The LinkedIn button is still fairly new but a great way to easily enable readers to share your content with their relevant networks on LinkedIn. This button will probably perform best with business, marketing and assorted internet related sites.

Email

That AOL/Nielsen Content Sharing study mentioned earlier stated 66% of the population use email as primary method of sharing. Offer an easy way to share your content via email because people seem to like doing that. I’m not fully convinced you need to display a button or link to encourage sharing over email because people are probably already used to just copying and pasting into email. However it never hurts to make things easier.

Social Bookmarking sites

I personally get waves of traffic from Stumbleupon and Reddit and some steady traffic from Delicious. Look at your analytics to figure out which sites your content is getting shared on and only display social bookmarking buttons that are performing well.

Some sites to consider are:

So Which Buttons Should I Use?

Most sites seem to stick to Facebook and Twitter because the share counts are traditionally higher because of the nature of the services. You might also want to experiment with LinkedIn and the Google +1 button as they increase in popularity.

I suggest only using buttons that display share counts. Displaying buttons with higher share counts creates a form of social proof that might encourage other readers to share your content. Also, displaying too many buttons can slow down your site which can in turn result in readers leaving your site while waiting for the page to load.

Socialize WordPress Plugin

The Socialize plugin for WordPress is a social bookmarking plugin that makes it easy to insert popular social sharing buttons into your content. The plugin is unique in that you can easily select which button to display on a page to page basis as well as rearrange the order of the buttons on that page. The plugin also encourages using actionable buttons recognized by the community as popular methods of sharing content. The plugin includes the new Google +1 button, 4 Twitter buttons, 2 Facebook buttons, a custom Delicious button, the LinkedIn button and a few more widgets and buttons from popular social media sites. Learn more on the WordPress plugin page.

14 WordPress Page Templates To Make Life Easier

Jon Bishop — Mon, 23 May 2011 08:40:03 +0000

I just finished writing a WPBusiness.info newsletter about WordPress page templates and how businesses could leverage them to create better content. In the email, I brainstorm about a few templates I think themes should be taking advantage of. This is my list of page templates to keep an eye out for in a new theme or possibly some worth adding to your current one.

Useful WordPress Page Templates

Full Width Page Template

This is probably the most widely used page template. It’s popular for landing pages on business sites and sometimes just an easy way to make extra space for a large graphic.
- (Example)
- (Code)
Site Map Page Template

A sitemap could be generated by a plugin but themes can often display them much more elegantly.
- (Example)
- (Code)
Gallery Page Template

A gallery page template could pull all images attached to a post and display them in an organized manner with some flashy effect. Also keep the new post formats and gallery shortcode in mind when creating galleries on the fly.
- (Example)
List Subpages/ChildPages Template

This page template display links of its subpages. Comes in handy more than you would think. This makes it easy to generate press release and news archives without using posts.
- (Code)
Team/Author Page Template

A team/author page template could display a list of employees at your company or authors of your blog by pulling from registered WordPress users or a custom post type.
- (Example)
- (Code)
Social Stream Page Template

Why not have a page template that lays out all of your social streams in an organized manner.
- (Example)
Logged In Page Template

A logged in page template is an easy way to restrict access to only logged in subscribers of your site.
- (Example)
- (Code)
Widgetized Content Page Template

This template would turn your main content area into a sidebar so you could load widgets where your content usually is.
- (Code)
Portfolio Page Template

This could display images similar to the gallery page template or it could have its own custom post type to pull from.
- (Example)
Redirect Page Template

This is a simple page template I’ve seen in a few popular premium themes. It’s basically an easy way to do a 301 redirect on your website without using plugins.
- (Code)
Contact Page Template

Some themes go as far as integrating custom form builders. You should at least look for good contact page templates. It’s also just an easy way to insert contact forms into pages.
- (Example)
- (Code)
Blog Page Template

A blog page templates displays your blog posts. Some themes will give you a few different display options.
- (Example)
- (Code)
Custom RSS Page Template

This page template makes it easy to display an RSS feed on any page.
- (Code)
Redirect to Child

Sometime you might have several subpages grouped together but no need for the parent page that holds them. This page template automatically redirects to the first child page.
- (Code)

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You could have custom page templates for videos, testimonials, services pages and more.

Let me know of any other page template ideas I should add to the list and maybe any themes you think are using WordPress page templates in cool ways.

Introducing Socialize 2.0

Jon Bishop — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:15:17 +0000

Almost 10 months after I was able to get Socialize 1.0 out we can now move on to Socialize 2.0. This release is a major rewrite of the plugin code to reduce the number of calls to the database and increase the plugin’s flexibility.

Video of Socialize 2.0 Settings

More Placement Control

I cleaned up the stylesheet a bit to play nice with certain buttons, Facebook Like, and created a new option to display your buttons horizontally. The stylesheet can also now be disabled so you can create custom code.

Sorting

I’ve wanted this one for awhile. What sets Socialize apart from the rest is the ability to selectively display the buttons of your choice on different posts, pages, etc. The only thing missing was the ability to easily rearrange the order of the selected buttons.

Well now rearranging buttons is as easy as dragging them around and saving your post. You can also change the order of the default buttons being displayed in the same manner.

Open Graph Integration

Open Graph meta tags help your site become a rich object in a social graph. Facebook and other sites use this data to learn more about your site and the page being shared.

You can now easily associate your Facebook Like button with a Facebook page using you App ID.

Bitly Integration

Bitly is a great way to get simple click data about a link all the while keeping the link small and friendly for the internet. You can now insert your Bitly username and API key to generate Bitly links you can track.

More Design Control

While I was updating the Socialize plugin, I began adding more means of controlling the looks of the share buttons. I ended up with a whole new page in the admin with complete control over every button in the Socialize plugin.

I also revamped the Call to Action area, allowing you to edit every aspect of how it’s displayed. You can change the border size, color and style as well as use template tags to change the HTML within the Call to Action area.

Custom Post Type Support

Finally, I added better Custom Post type support to the point where you can disable and enable the socialize plugin on specific post types.

The Future

I had a lot planned for this release but time forced me to trim some of the fat. I won’t give up on some of my ideas tho and here are some features to keep en eye out for:

Mobile integration
Shortcodes
Developer API
Front End editing
New/Custom Buttons

… and some secret awesome stuff you’ll just have to wait for.

What Is Socialize?

The idea was to create an easy to use plugin that allowed bloggers to selectively add social bookmarks to their post. Furthermore I wanted to only use actionable buttons with counters because I believe displaying a posts social activity gives it positive social proof and can lead to more shares and more views.

This plugin also includes what I like to call an ‘alert box’ that is selectively displayed below posts and pages to encourage comments and sharing. You can also insert buttons into this post to increase the sharing potential.

The plugin is designed to make it easy for readers to share your content and give you full control of what is displayed where.

Download Socialize

So go check out the plugin page and try it out.

Remember if you are upgrading, be sure to deactivate the plugin first and reactivate it once you have uploaded the files.

12 WordPress Plugins to Enhance Your Business Website

Jon Bishop — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:27:06 +0000

Your website should work for you, not the other way around. Large and small businesses alike flock to WordPress because of its flexibility and widespread adoption, and for good reason. WordPress can be configured to meet your own business needs at very low costs.

A New Resource For Businesses on WordPress

I’m starting a newsletter aimed at helping businesses get the most out of WordPress. It’s free to subscribe and I’ll be creating original WordPress plugins as exclusive gifts to my subscribers. You can find more information at WPBusiness.info.

Plugins For Business Websites

Working with WordPress should be easy. What started out as simple blog software is now a powerful content management system with a growing list of community generated plugins to help you get what ever functionality your company needs on your website. Below is a list of plugins I think all businesses should be aware of. The goal is to minimize the amount of time needed to manage your site so you can focus on your business. Every business has different website goals so choose the ones that are best for you.

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO helps avoid duplicate content issues and encourages common SEO best practices when creating and editing posts. You could get by without an SEO plugin if you really wanted to as WordPress does a great job by itself and your content is really all that matters.

Gravity Forms

This plugin solves one of WordPress biggest shortcomings, the lack of a form generator. There are a lot of plugins that do a great job but Gravity Forms is the easiest to use. Just drag and drop the form elements you want and easily configure and insert into posts. Like I said, your WordPress site should work for you, not the other way around.

(I only endorse a few premium plugins and this is one of them. This is a paid link so if you like it please use it.)

Subscribe2 HTML

It’s important to keep your subscribers coming back to your site. If you are regularly blogging and posting valuable content you should allow visitors to subscribe via email so they can get future articles delivered to their email.

WordPress Portfolio Plugin

This post is about keeping your site easy to manage and making it work for you. Showing off your work is essential for a lot of business sites so you need an easy way to manage it. Enter WordPress portfolio. Easily group projects and display them on your site for the world to see how awesome you really are.

Events

This plugin is great for scheduling events to be displayed on your site in the sidebar or on its own events page. Events can be recurring and can link to external registration pages.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Retaining your visitors by recommending related content is an easy way to increase time on site and your odds of converting the visit into a lead.

WPtouch

The rise of the smart phone has raised the demand for mobile enabled websites. The great thing about using WordPress to manage your content is you can easily install a plugin to make your site mobile ready.

WP-Stats-Dashboard

Back to this posts mantra, “making your site work for you”, your site data should be readily available as soon as you log in so you can gauge its success. This plugin lets you display the stats relevant to your business on your dashboard so you can be up to speed on your sites metrics in seconds.

Easily navigate pages on dashboard

While we are making things easy, I’ve used this plugin on several business sites to create a one click access point to pages from the main dashboard. It’s also an easy way to see your site’s layout without having to dig.

J Shortcodes

This plugin allows you to easily create customized styled web elements like buttons, content boxes, tabs, accordion panels and more. It’s an easy way to help content stick out without having to know CSS or HTML.

WordPress Calls to Action

Calls to action are displayed randomly based on the category they are assigned to. If no category is assigned to a Call to Action then that action will display on pages with no categories. The plugin also displays impressions and clicks.

Custom Admin Branding

Last but not least you should make your website yours. Branding WordPress is easy with the custom admin branding plugin.

Your business site should be easy to manage and deliver results. You should be able to easily track those results and make changes as needed. Experiment with different plugins and look at what others are doing. Make your website work for you.

- Header photo by vladislav.bezrukov

Embracing Social Tools

Jon Bishop — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 05:33:24 +0000

My mother shared the following article with me in an email: Professionalism “Less than Desired” in Entry-Level Employees – SURVEY RESULTS.

I was surprised by some of the results and disagree with a few statements made on the side. The article suggests that students aren’t making the grade as professionals in the workplace, mainly because they feel a sense of entitlement, expecting reward without putting effort. David Polk whose firm was commissioned to complete the study mentions problems with IT etiquette and goes on to say:

“Some of these problems in the workplace are the same things we are seeing in the classroom,” … “Students and employees alike are text messaging, surfing the Internet, and responding to cell phone calls at inappropriate times. It appears that for many the need to be in constant contact with friends and family has become an addiction. The addicted no longer see it as rude to be obsessively responding to calls or text messages.”

The real problem is that organizations and universities have failed to properly utilize these new communication tools that we appear “addicted” to. Companies should instead put together social media policies to regulate and facilitate the proper usage of these tools. The internet and these new technologies create new possibilities for marketing, sales, HR, collaboration and social awareness that should not be overlooked.

When it comes to our education system, Sir Ken Robinson says it best “.. It’s like we’re all being trained to be university professors”. Students are force fed the same curriculum with little favor towards true personal growth. Kids are clumped into groups based on age and location with little attention to their passions and talents. We need to shift from the old “assembly line” mindset to a more passion driven model.

First we need to see a change in the education system where individuals learn how to better use these tools to innovate and cooperate. Then we need to see organizations change their mindset and advise employees on best practices when it comes to internet usage.

Yes, my generation does feel entitled because we have access to more information than the generation before us. Hopefully the next generation will have access to even more information and will in turn teach mine. But the fact remains that we might just know things “seasoned workers” fail to see because everything is moving so fast. Hopefully we can all catch up and move forward as the human race instead of individual generations of that race.

Conclusion

Times are changing and so should the workplace and our education system. We need more access to technology inside and outside of the classrooms for educational purposes. Learning should be fueled by curiosity and allowed to mutate and wander with the mind. The workplace should also reflect these same ideals.

Additional Resources For Teachers:

Additional Resources For Companies:

Optimizing WordPress Posts With Socialize

Jon Bishop — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:34:53 +0000

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13 Plugins Your WordPress Site Might Need

Jon Bishop — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 06:00:22 +0000

There are thousands of plugins in the WordPress Plugin directory. These are 13 plugins I seem to revisit the most often and recommend to clients and friends. This list differs from the one I wrote a little over a year ago because a) it has pictures, and b) a lot has happened since last year.

Gravity Forms

Gravity forms makes it incredibly easy to create web forms for your site. Some things I liked about it were the conditional form fields and the ability to monitor and export data. If you can’t shell out the money for Gravity Forms, Contact Forms 7 is still a suitable alternative.

Google Analytics for WordPress

As far as Google Analytics plugins go, this one is the best. Not only does it assist in adding the Google Analytics tracking code but it can also track outbound links and insert itself in the header or footer.

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO is the most complete search engine optimization plugin you will find. Not only does it assist with titles and meta information but it can create XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs and much more.

Open Graph Protocol Tools

This plugin adds meta information to your WordPress header to enable your web page to become a rich object in a social graph. The Open Graph Protocal is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page. If you’re having problems with Facebook or Digg using the wrong image when you try and submit your posts this plugin might help.

Socialize

I have a few plugins in the WordPress plugin repository but this is the only one I think people really need to know about. It allows you to selectively display the most popular social bookmarking buttons on your website. It also provides a call to action area at the bottom that you can edit for specific posts to request further action from your readers.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is the fastest caching plugin for WordPress and is used by a lot of popular websites.

WPtouch

WPtouch is the most popular plugin for making your website mobile ready. The plugin detects mobile browsers and styles your site accordingly.

Secure WordPress

Secure WordPress allows you to selectively turn off WordPress functionality that poses a threat to your site.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

A great way to keep people on your blog is to recommend similar blog posts when they have finished reading the current one. The plugin has a bunch of settings making it easy to customize for your blog.

WP-DB-Backup

This one is straight and to the point. Back up your wordpress site so if something goes wrong you don’t kill yourself.

Subscribe to Comments

This plugin goes on my list of essentials. It’s the easiest way to get repeat visits from your commenters. It basically allows commenters to subscribe to all future comments on a post.

WordPress Blog Stats

I use this in conjunction with Google Analytics for two reasons.

I like having stats integrated into my dashboard.
I like being able to use that data with other plugins.

It’s not like the data is collected any faster than Google Analytics as both have a decent delay however it’s nice to see what another service has to say about my websites traffic.

Akismet

This one’s simple, it marks spam as spam for you so you don’t have to.

Competitor Website Reports and Analytics

Jon Bishop — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:05:48 +0000

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something on the Internet is to check and see how other people are already doing it. Here is a small collection of tools I use to learn more about other websites. You should obviously already be using Google Analytics on your own site on top of whatever other tracking scripts you are using. This is just a list of tools you can plug any web address into and learn all about that site. Each tool does something a bit different so explore and play around a bit.

Traffic and Visibility

Alexa.com
Alexa provides information about websites including Top Sites, Internet Traffic Stats and Metrics, Related Links, Online Reviews Contact Information and Search Analytics for SEM and SEO optimization.

Compete.com
Compete helps you benefit from click-sharing by providing free services that create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet.

quantcast.com
A new breed of measurement service helping buyers and sellers quantify the characteristics of digital audiences against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions.

quarkbase.com
See people, traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more about websites.

Xinureturns.com
Check PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings and more.

SEO

Open Site Explorer via SEOMoz
Linkscape provides link data never available before on over 41+ billion URLs across 366+ million domains.

Term Extractor via SEOMoz
This tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.

Website Grader via HubSpot
Free SEO tool that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website.

SEO Analysis Tool via SEOWorkers.com
This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages.

MarkosWeb.com
A web service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for.

Keyword Monitoring and Discovery

KeywordSpy.com
SEO & PPC Keyword Research software tool, that unveil your competitors’ most profitable Ad copies & keywords.

SpyFu.com
Spy on your online competitors. Download competitors keywords and adwords.

SEMRush.com
SEMRush.com is a another great competitive research tool.

Social

Blog Grader via HubSpot
Blog Grader provide a free tool to grade your Blog and provide recommendations on how to improve its effectiveness.

HowSociable.com
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

SocialWebsiteAnalyzer.com
Monitoring the social presence of your website on the top 20 social media websites.

Speed and Other Site Information

BuiltWith
Web technology information profiler tool. Find out what a site is using.

Web Page Analyzer via Websiteoptimization.com
Calculate page size, composition, and download time.

Readability.info
Readability.info offers readability scores, style, grammar, school paper analysis, readability scores (Kincaid, ARI, Coleman-Liau, Flesch, Fog, Lix and SMOG) for Web pages.

If your favorite tool isn’t listed please share it in the comments.

Jon Bishop

How I Get The Most Out Of TweetDeck

Managing Multiple Accounts

Search Terms

Twitter Lists

Publishing

Making Your Website Social

How Do You Make Your Website Social?

Start With a Social Media Presence

Maintain A Blog

Social Widgets

Start a Forum

Promote and Host Events

Reviews

RSS and Email Lists

Wrap-up

Creating Presentations With Custom Post Types

The Design

Create Our Custom Post Types

Create Presentation Taxonomy

Add Contextual Help For Our Custom Post Type

Add Custom Columns To Custom Post Type List

Use A Custom Template For Our Custom Post Type

Redirect Our Custom Post Type To A Taxonomy

Finished Code

Why You Should Check Out Your Local WordPress Meetup

Keeping Up With WordPress

Learn Something New

Meet Great People

Great Networking

Get Your WordPress Questions Answered

Because It’s The Year Of The Meetup

Why Do I Do It?

Getting The Most Out Of Your RSS Reader: Finding The Most Relevant Content

Getting The Most Out Of Your RSS Reader: Full Posts Instead Of Summaries

Keeping Up With WordPress

WordPress News

WordPress Forums

WordPress Podcasts & Streams

WordPress Videos

WordPress Chat

WordPress Tutorial Sites

WordPress Local

WordPress Newsletter

Bonus

How To Make Social Sharing Buttons Display Faster and Measure Their Effectiveness

Getting Ready For Social Media in 2012

Optimize For Mobile

Provide Mobile Offers and Incentives

More QR Codes and Some NFC

Collaboration Is Key To Innovation

Automation

Personal Network Integration

Redefining What’s Relevant

Conclusion

Automating The Internet With ifttt

How Does It Work?

So What Can This Cool New Tool Do?

Scratching The Surface Of Free And Easy To Use Automation Tools

New To Twitter? Learn Who To Follow

Find Tweeps You Know In Real Life

Find Local Tweeps

Find Tweeps With Similar Interests

Finding Tweeps in Lists

Quality Quality Quality

Follow Us and Say Hi/Welcome

WordPress and Shortcodes

Pros and Cons of WordPress Shortcodes

Themes vs Plugins

Usability

Speed

Resources

Code Snippets

Advanced Development

Plugins & Themes

Slides from Boston WordPress Meetup

Come to Boston WordCamp

Which Bookmarking & Sharing Buttons Should I Display On My Site

What Are Your Options?

Google +1