This is something I wondered about years ago but here you go. From Matt Cutts himself.  Google has a policy against giving special treatment to their customers apparently. It’s a good thing and evens the playing field.

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So I looked around for a while and found some possible solutions but most of them seemed to be a bit of a hassle until I found this Kickstarter WordPress plugin by Dan Conley.

He says that it’s delicate because it might break if Kickstarter changes.

It’s fragile as hell: if KS ever changes their url structure, or the location of their videos, etc etc, it will break. I could put more work into it, and I’m sure there are plugins that may do this exact thing already, but this seemed to be the quickest option. If you think this could be helpful, you can right click and save kickstarter.php and upload it to your wp-contents/plugins directory.

The link is broken so here is the code. Just save it as a php file and upload as usual to your plugin folder:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Kickstart embedder
Description: Add [kickstarter file=link_to_project /] (ie [kickstarter file=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2pp/minecraft-the-story-of-mojang /] to embed a Kickstarter video
Version: 0.5
Author: Dan Conley
Author URI: http://www.danconley.net
*/

function Kickstarter_Parse ($content) {
	global $post;
	$content = preg_replace("/\[kickstarter file=https:\/\/www\.kickstarter\.com\/projects\/([^ ]+) \/\]/i","<iframe frameborder=\"0\" height=\"410px\" src=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/$1/widget/video.html\" width=\"480px\"></iframe>",$content);

	return $content;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'Kickstarter_Parse');
?>

This plugin is not available in the WordPress Plugin repository and the author has not promised to keep it updated so there is a risk but you never know. I have already used it successfully in my Rude Retro blog to post about the Form 1 3D Printer Kickstarter project. Check it out!

Links: Kickstarter WordPress Plugin | Dan Conley 

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Have you ever been writing a post with the help of someone who does not have access to your blog and needed to give them the ability to preview it before publishing? This plugin takes care of that by generating a URL with an expiring nonce that can be given out for public preview.

All you have to do is install the plugin, enable Public Preview on the post and share the link. And there you have previews for unpublished WordPress posts.

Link: Public Post Preview on WordPress.org

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Warning: video contains vulgar language.

This is something that has been annoying me for a while. I often use my wife’s PC which is Japanese and Google Chrome automatically detects the language and displays menus etc. in Japanese. That doesn’t bother me so much as I can find my way around Chrome easily enough.

What annoyed me was that it also changed the default language for other Google products such as Adsense and Google Affiliate Network. I didn’t realize the problem was with Chrome until today though. Previously I searched those products settings looking for how to change the default language from Japanese to English. I couldn’t find the settings. Of course it is not easy to find things that don’t exist. And I don’t feel as confident checking the settings in Japanese as I do in English.

Anyway, I found the above video on how to change Chrome’s default language from Japanese to English and despite the crude language it works well. I didn’t seem to work for me at first though as when I restarted Chrome the settings hadn’t changed.

At first I thought it was because Chrome needed to be updated and so I updated it but that didn’t work and then I thought that it was because Chrome was synced with Chrome on my own PC but that didn’t make sense because my PC is in English already.

Then it occurred to me that Chrome wasn’t actually shutting down and went to the Windows Task Manager and under Processes I could see that there were many instances of Chrome running. I terminated the processes, restarted Chrome and bingo, the Chrome default language is now English. And so is the default language of Adsense and Google Affiliate Network etc.

This is a tutorial for how to change Chrome’s default language from English to Japanese but I am sure it works just as well with other languages.

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Up until today I have been using Wordbooker. I haven’t been very happy with it for a few reasons. One is that it occasionally seemed to switch off and another is that it occasionally posted to my personal Facebook profile rather than to my the Facebook page as it was supposed to. The last reason I wasn’t all that happy with it was that it had so many features that I wasn’t interested in using and I like things to be streamlined if possible.

Today the creator of Wordbooker announced on his blog that the Wordbooker plugin had been pulled from the WordPress depository for various reasons and that he was feeling quite disheartened and may not continue developing the plugin. I feel bad for him but I’m sure WordPress have good reasons for removing the plugin as there is no benefit for them to remove a good plugin.

So I searched for a replacement plugin and found one called Facebook Page Publish that seemed it would do the trick and be much tidier than Wordbooker to boot. The problem is that it wasn’t updated for a while and the installation guide is dated. So I decided to create this guide to Facebook Page Publish.

Use Facebook Page Publish to post WordPress posts to Facebook automatically

1. Install and Activate Facebook Page Publish.

2. In your WordPress settings menu click on Facebook Page Publish to see options.

3. Create a Facebook application. (Don’t panic, it’s easy!) You need to be logged in to Facebook.

4. Click Create New App.

5. A pop-up will come asking you to name your app. The App Display Name is what visitors to your Facebook Page will see so make it relevant. I’d just use the name of the site it is promoting. (eg. The Huffington Post) and the App Namespace can usually be the same but without spaces or capital letters. Don’t worry about it too much.

Agree to the Facebook Platform Policies and click Continue.

6. Add App Domain in the next page. Other areas should already be filled in. (See image below.)

7. Below that area click on Website and enter your full domain including http://.

Go to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.

8. Click on the Advanced Tab in the sidebar:

9. You need to set deprecate offline_access to disabled. Scroll down the page and click Save. *

10. Copy and paste the Application ID Application Secret from your Facebook app (see blurred area of no. 6 above if you are not sure where it is) into the fields in the Facebook Page Publish Options page in your WordPress control panel.

11. Click Save Changes. (There will be an error message but ignore it.) Then click Grant Access. (The error message should disappear.)

12. In option 2 and 3 you can can choose some options like whether to post to profile or page and whether to include excerpt or not etc. Click save after you make your choices.

Test it? Working?

The End.

* I found this in the WordPress.org forum. I am not sure about what security risks there may be.

Other ways to post WordPress posts to Facebook Automatically

Of course there are other options out there. Just Google it and you can find them. Some are free, some are not. If you are on WordPress.com they have a great Publicize app already included. I hope they make it available for us sometime in the future.

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Spam Followers

I think I would classify them as spam followers. They haven’t spammed me with direct messages or tweets but I do get notifications telling me I have a new follower which I check to see whether I should follow them back or not. Well, now I don’t check because they are fairly recognizable but I do open the email. The twitter follower is not such a big deal despite the fact that it is not a true follower. I suspect the vast majority of followers don’t ever check their Twitter accounts anyway so we never really know the number of true followers.

The only thing I can think of is that they are building these accounts to sell to people who can just change the name and have instant followers. I’m not sure how effective that would be as a marketing strategy but perhaps there is some statistic that shows that the more followers you have the more like it is that someone will follow you?

Identify your spam followers

After a quick search of Google I found a tool called TwitBlock that analyses your Twitter followers and judges whether they are spam followers or not. I didn’t use it to block any account but in one of my Twitter accounts it identified 9 out of 180 as possible spam accounts. That doesn’t seem to bad really.

Link: TwitBlock

What do you think?

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Update: it seems that this is only an experiment and it will disappear at some point but the good news is that they say they are working on an even better system.

We’re working on something that I believe is even better, and when that’s ready for a public trial we’ll let you know.

Source: Dirk Balfanz on Google+

Google has created a way for people to log into a public computer without typing in your password so now you can sign in to Google safely on public computers. That’s pretty cool. You will need a smartphone with a camera and a QR code scanner app that is signed into Google to do it though.

How to sign in to Google safely on Public Computers

You just go to the following url, scan the QR code (That’s all that is on the page.) and go to the url it provides on your smartphone. If you are not logged into Google on your phone it will ask you to log in.

Link: https://accounts.google.com/sesame

I tested it and I was asked if I wanted to start with gmail or iGoogle. It took about a second after signing in on my phone to be signed in to my gmail account on the PC. Very cool.

On the other hand, I think the days of people signing in to public computers are numbered considering most people can check their email with smart phones or carry a tablet or ultrabook with them when they are travelling. I did log onto a public computer to do some work one night when I was in Paris last Autumn and maybe once on a trip back to Japan but before that I don’t remember when I did it. Probably years. And looking at the amazing lineup of new (and cheap) laptops and tablets that were announced at CES this year I think a lot of people will be tempted to splash out. I think that by the end of 2013 the number of people in the more developed nations who have some type of tablet will outnumber the ones that don’t.

In the meantime though, this does seem like a very safe way to sign in to Google on public computers. What do you think?

Source: Google+ via Lifehacker

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As you may or may not know, I have a blog called Tee Reviewer. It is a t-shirt news and review blog. Recently I posted a list of the 21 most important t-shirt blogs of 2011. (Please check it out.) I follow most, if not all of the blogs listed and the list took me a while to compile and arrange. And as you can see (if you check it out) I also wrote a comment about each blog. If you are a blogger, I’m sure you understand that making a list post like this is time-consuming and simply hard work. It was a good post and when I completed it I spent some time promoting it as well. So why am I writing a post about how not to steal blog content?

Today I found that another blogger basically copied nearly all the content from one of my posts and posted it on his own blog. Of course I am not too happy about that. The post that took me hours to write and promote is being used on someone else’s site and it probably just took them two minutes to steal it and post it. It is definitely a good example of how not to steal blog content.

This was orignially posted on teereviewer.com, you can find the original post here. I have a giant list of blogs listed on my site but haven’t made any updates in a while.

He did give me credit though (see above quote) so that’s something. But it’s not totally clear that he didn’t write the post originally on Tee Reviewer (my site) first and then re-post it on his own site. I’ll give him the benefit of doubt here though and assume that it was not his intention to obfuscate. Put aside his intentions though and let’s just look at how it appears. Below is screenshot of his introduction text. (I added the highlighting.)

Only two lines of original content

So, the first two sentences are his introduction, basically the next hardest part of creating the post after copying and pasting the content from my site. The second line of the first paragraph (his content) says:

I have a giant list of blogs listed on my site but haven’t made any updates in a while.

and the first line of the next paragraph (my content) says:

Of course you probably want to know how I created this list of the 20 most important t-shirt blogs.

I think most people would think that the “I” in both of these articles are one and the same, the author of the article. Especially as people mostly scan internet articles. As I have decided to give him the benefit of the doubt in this case I’ll say that it is laziness rather than deviousness that makes this look like his own original content rather than what it actually is, stolen content.

Lazy Thief

Of course I have a few things to back up the idea that this is the work of a lazy thief. Not just the accidental(?) obfuscation above that makes people believe he has produced original content.

1. He wrote only two short sentences of original text.
2. In those two sentences there was a spelling mistake.
3. In the image above, I highlighted two pieces of text. One of them says 20 most important t-shirt blogs and the other says 21 blogs. In the original Tee Reviewer post there were 21 blogs in the list. But this blogger changed the list to 20. But the thief was too lazy to change the one other piece of text from 21 to 20. Or perhaps he didn’t even read it.
4.  He copy and pasted my article.
5. He is hotlinking my images rather than downloading them and uploading to his own server.
6. He didn’t bother to remove unrelated content from the article. (See image below.)
7. He has his own list but didn’t bother to edit it, instead he just steals mine.

Content unrelated to the list

Evil Thief

I know I said I’d give him the benefit of the doubt but let’s for a moment imagine that he is not a lazy idiot and that he intentionally stole my content and tried to pass it off as his own. There is some evidence that this may be the case and let me lay it out for you:

1. He changed the title of the post and the number of blogs in the list.
2. His introduction, while including a link to my original post, is written in a way that allows others to think that he compiled this list and that the opinions in it are his.
3. There were originally 21 blogs.The blog that was removed from the list was my blog, Tee Reviewer, which ironically was where the article was originally published.
4. He is hotlinking my images for his post and using my bandwidth.
5. He removed two links at the bottom to two of my other websites.
6. I linked to his website and he steals my content. (Biting the hand that feeds it?)

How I am dealing with the content thief

• The first step I took was sending him an email requesting that he reduce it to just an excerpt (if he wouldn’t mind).
• Then I commented on the post saying that I had sent an email, to please check his spam folder if he hasn’t received the email.
• After looking at the post some more I emailed him at another address with more details about how I’d like the post to be: maximum 3 of the list with a link at the bottom and the top of the post to the original post, and to make it clearer that it was not his content.

It’s not all bad.

After all that I say it’s not all bad? Yes, it’s true. I don’t know how many hits his blog gets but it gets some and some of the people who see this new post may even click through to the original (if they notice the link). Also his blog has a PR4 and my blog has yet to get a PR since switching domains a few weeks back. So I may even get some Google juice from this.

How to steal blog content

So far this post has been about how not to steal blog content but there are ways to use other people’s content on your website without being seen as an asshole. Every blogger has a different opinion but here is my advice for people who want to continue using other people’s content without being the subject of  a how not to steal blog content post like this one.

1. Contact the original author and ask them. (Simple. OK, it’s not really stealing if you get permission but no one likes a thief.)

It’s a very short list but that’s it really. Some authors are fine with it, some have conditions and some just don’t allow it but at least you know you did the right thing.

Who is this thief?

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned any names or provided any links to this blog post. I may at a later point but probably not. I hope he will understand my point of view and do the right thing. I think with a little detective work it can easily be worked out though.

He is a blogger and t-shirt shop owner so I think he should understand what he has done is wrong. I don’t think he would be too happy if I copied one of his articles and tried to pass it off as my own or if I used one of his t-shirt designs, altered it slightly and sold it in my store. Even if I gave him credit.

Follow up – what’s next?

Update: the stolen content has been removed from his site. He apologized but only after I asked. See his response below.

Well, it’s been over 16 hours since I contacted him first but it’s the weekend. I’ll give it a bit more time before I do anything else but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Hopefully though I won’t do anything too mean. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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I decided to learn how to import Tumblr to WordPress. The reason is a friend of mine is thinking of moving his Tumblr to a WordPress installation  because he feels that the limitations of Tumblr are holding him back so I was wondering how easy it would be do make the move. In the WordPress 3.3 update I had noticed that a Tumblr Importer had been included so my guess is that it would be easy.

Important: If you are using a custom domain at Tumblr disable it before you try to import Tumblr to WordPress as it won’t work and you will get an error message: Problem communicating with Tumblr, retrying later

How to import Tumblr to WordPress Stage 1

1. In the sidebar roll your cursor over Tools and click Import in the flyout menu.
2. Click and install Tumblr from the list of importers (assuming it is not already installed).
3. Click Activate and Run Installer.
4. On the next page enter your Tumblr email and password and click Connect to Tumblr.
5. If you have more than one Tumblr look at the one you wish to import. (It can only import one Tumblr at a time.)
6. If you have more than one author on your WordPress blog select the one you want associated with the Tumblr.
7. Click Import this blog.
8. Be patient. (You can click Refresh view to see if anything has been imported or you can check your website to see if any posts have been added.) The more posts you have on Tumblr the longer it’s going to take. The speed may also depend on how busy Tumblr’s servers are.

If you are getting the Problem communicating with Tumblr, retrying later message and you don’t have a custom domain enabled you might just need to be patient. There could be other problems though such as your web host might have a firewall to prevent sites connecting to Tumblr. Just ask your host. I occasionally saw the message with DreamHost but it transferred the Tumblr regardless.

You can easily check your Tumblr dashboard to see how many posts you have and then compare them to the number that have been imported in your WordPress panel. I waited but didn’t see any notification that all the posts had been transferred. When the numbers matched I clicked Clear account information in WordPress.

If you want to continue using the custom domain for your Tumblr don’t forget to set that up again.

How to import Tumblr to WordPress Stage 2

You might be asking yourself “you mean it’s not finished”. You have imported the posts and hopefully they look alright but in reality you should manually check each post.

First of all I’ll tell you what should have worked well.

• Post date and time transferred.
• The text and standard formatting such as lists, bold, italics and strikethrough transferred. So did the blockquote.
• The tags were transferred.
• The images re-posted but without the alt tag. The original didn’t have a title tag. The caption was also intact.

What didn’t work so well.

• Page Titles
• Photosets (Tumbler gallery) – Photosets without a post title didn’t transfer for me.
• Imports to default category – You may have to re-categorize your posts.

Tumblr Page Title Problem

From an SEO perspective the page title is extremely important and it is one reason that people move their blogs from Tumblr to the WordPress platform.

With Tumblr there is no need for page titles as it is more like a long-form Twitter than a blog. So when the blogs are being transferred WordPress has to figure out what title to give the page from the information given. It seems to use different criteria depending on the type of post you have created and the information you have input.

In Tumblr you select the type of post you want to make:

1. Text
2. Photo
3. Quote
4. Link
5. Chat
6. Audio
7. Video

(In my test I just looked at the text, photo, quote, link and video post types.)

Here are some possible outcomes:

Text: If you have used a title, it will be the page title. If you haven’t used a title, it will use the first sentence or a truncated version if it is too long.

Photo: If you have a caption, it will use that as the page title. If you don’t, it will use the custom url. If you don’t have a custom url, the post will have no title or be called “Untitled”. (Photosets don’t transfer.)

Quote: Uses the source as the title if you have one, the quote itself if you don’t.

Link: Uses the description if you have one. If you don’t an empty untitled post will be created. No link.

Video: This is the strangest one. When you embed a YouTube video the YouTube url is used as the page title and if you have a description it will be appended to the title. I haven’t tried other videos.

What should you take away from this?

The page title is very important regarding SEO but posts that are untitled or contain a url will make your site look unprofessional so you need to go through every post manually to check the titles and fix them if necessary.

While you are fixing your post titles you might categorize your posts but I will talk more about that in the next post.

Make sure all your photosets posts have a title as they may not transfer.

While it may seem like a lot of trouble to import your Tumblr to WordPress, if you are serious about your blog, I’m sure it is worth the trouble. I hope this guide on how to import Tumblr to WordPress helps you out. If you had a different experience than me I’d love to hear about it. That’s what the comment area is for.

Link: Tumblr Importer

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It’s true, Twitter is everywhere!

I just watched the 3rd trailer for this movie over on Apple. it looks pretty good and I’m looking forward to watching it. I am enjoying Liam Neeson’s action hero status. He is a totally believable tough guy. But that’s not why I am writing this post.

Link: The Grey on Apple

So, why am I saying that Twitter is everywhere? At the end of this trailer on Apple.com I noticed that the credits were a little different than you normally. As you can see in the image below, instead of using people’s real names they either used their twitter username or a hashtag version of their names for easy searching on Twitter.

Twitter Usernames and Hashtags as credits

I will be writing a post soon about why you need to be on Twitter but this is just to show you how ubiquitous it has become. Twitter is everywhere. Get used to it. No, don’t just get used to it. Get on it.

Link: Twitter

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