February, 2009 » Archiv

32

6 ways to track your link clicks on twitter

February
23

I love stats, I really like to take them apart to see what did what and what didn’t. I also love twitter.
Now, if you can put stats and twitter together then I’m drooling.

Here’s 6 ways I have found to track the links that I post on Twitter.

Install Get-Shorty

Getshorty is a beta script available that allows you to install your own personal tiny url service to your server. It allows you to use keywords as part of the url or let it automatically create one for you.
Site: Get-shorty

Create your own URL shortener with WP 2.7

This is an excellent way to completely control how your links look and where they point to. It takes a little work and some template changes but combine it with some decent stats tracking and you will have a full service all to yourself!
More info: Business Mind Hacks

Google Analytics

If you have Google Analytics on your page you can add some variables to the end of the your URL so google can store some extra information about the visitor.
Example:
http://www.you.com/?utm_campaign=promotion&utm_source=twitter&tm_medium=social
You will still need to use a URL shortener such as tinyurl or one of the others that don’t provide tracking services.
More info: Epikone

Use Tweetburner

You can use tweetburner to shorten a url for you and track how it performs over time. The advantage of this is that the twurl.nl links are integrated into desktop programs such as twhirl and tweetdeck.
Site: Tweetburner

Use Budurl

This is another URL shortening service with added support for link tracking. Their dashboard for tracking your links is quite extensive and a dream for stats geeks.
site: Budurl

Use bit.ly

This is my favourite URL shortener service. It’s integrated with tweetdeck and the stats page is very useful. You can even watch results in real time as people click your links. You can look at the stats on any bit.ly link by entering it into the search box or if you register and provide your twitter username, you can bring up all the bit.ly links you have used in your tweets and see how many clicks have happened over time.
Site: bit.ly
(you can see the results of this post being retweeted by @styletime on this link here)

You don’t have to have twitter to use these tools, they’ll work perfectly well for affiliate links and flyer links. I’d recommend going with the self hosted option if you post a lot of links on forums or other places where they stay a long time so you can be sure they wont expire or if you need to update where it points to.

Blog Tools, twitter

31

Please, don't do this on twitter.

February
20

Ok, there are some things that tick me off on Twitter. Not enough that I lose my temper and throw stuff but, enough that I can move my fingers in a typey typey way to tell you about it.

This is how I shrink filter the growing list of people I follow..

1. if you send an autoDM with a link to your site

Take the above picture (please, take it and throw it away!). How is it these people have 4000+ followers with autoDM’s like this? do they work? oh god I hope not.

2. if you tell me anything about your god

This is a thing I like about twitter. There’s no religious tweets in my stream, for the life of me I can’t see how 140 characters could get someone to join your god. The religious can tweet to each other all day long but how many people of a different god will continue to listen?

3. if you spurt many many messages in one go so you dominate my column

I know you must be on an interesting site or going through some great links but, slow down! by the time I have checked out the first link. The public timeline has evolved more messages and I lose the rest!

4. if you use viral pyramid follow things

What’s the matter with you? will you hand over your twitter username and password to just any old whacko who promises you a squillion followers? take a second and think about it…

5. if you use number 4 as your first autoDM when I follow you

die die die.

6. if you use big bad swear words too frequently

I get it, I’m an adult and I swear so I understand when things need an expletive or two but not when it’s every second f***ing word!

7. if you have 1 update and it’s a link to your site

Hey! I has got url, an I has got twitter. I can add thems up and gets traffic!
fewls

8. if you spell reely baldly

it’s you’re funny not, your funny.
my funny what?

Well, that’s not bad! only 8 things. I could go on all day listing things about instant messengers!

What gets your goat on twitter?

Social Networking, twitter

8

Creative genius, where does it come from? I think she knows..

February
14

This is a wonderful talk by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat Pray Love” #1 best seller fame. She talks about genius and a different way of looking at it (or, an older way of looking at it). I can’t tell you how nice it was to hear someone else explain something I’ve felt myself. How you get your genius or how an idea/poem/story/invention et al come to you.

For me, it’s code. Or more accurately, algorithms. I’m not a coding genius, far from it! but, I can see a picture of what needs to be done for a particular idea. It’s just a case of finding the right syntax to fit the slots together.

My code comes to me and waits patiently in the corner. Sometimes for days, just poking me gently now and then until I get distracted by something. Then it seeps into my head. From then on, all time stands still and music is made. Sure, I can’t play all the instruments well and my composition may be basic but, a genie comes to play in my head and we always have painful fun learning enough new code so I can get it out of my head before I go crazy.

Watch the video, you’ll know what I’m talking about. All people that create things will understand what she goes on about. olé olé

plus, she sounds really clever, I like her much and I think we should have dinner one day.

Blog News, Reviews, contests

16

To autoDM a new follower on Twitter : is it good or bad?

February
13

AutoDM is a method of sending a new twitter follower a direct message as soon as they follow you, usually along the lines of “hi, thanks for following me. check out my site/product/ebook/software” (delete as appropriate). You usually have to give your username and password to a 3rd party site so they can monitor your follower list and send out your message when a new one gets added.

As you can probably guess, I am not a fan! To me, using a bot to send a direct message is the height (or low) of insincerity. If someone wants to pitch me their product (and yes, giving away something you wrote is a pitch) then wouldn’t it be polite to actually message me first? Why get a bot to do it for you, sure it’s easy and it never forgets but would you send a robot with a card about your gift shop to every new person that sends you a Christmas card? I wouldn’t but, I don’t get Christmas cards (…long story!)

Now, most people get an email when they receive a DM. If I got an email from someone I don’t really know asking me to visit their site or download their ebook or buy their home made fluffy balls (really!) then I would consider it spam. It’s unsolicited, it’s sent to mass numbers of people, it benefits the sender and the receiver didn’t ask or qualify themselves to read/use/buy/play with it!

Here are some examples of what I consider to be an autoDM spam..

I used to do a straight unfollow for these but recently I have been replying with my own DM asking why they think an autoDM is a good idea when so many people say it isn’t. I have yet to receive a reply, except, from @CoachDeb.

She (her bot) sent this..

I may have been a teensy weensy bit annoyed or perhaps feeling too big for my boots because I had just pipped over 1000 followers a little earlier so I replied with ..

.. in the public timeline (for shame!) and gawd bless her, she responded less violently than I think I would have if someone had ‘forshame’d me on their public timeline…

Suffice to say, no-one thanked me :-) Fair play to her though, she’s got over 11,000 followers and she coulda moidered me with her army of loyal fans!

I think I can see that those that use autoDM think it’s a great feature and tool to use but those that don’t use them, think they’re spam and not needed. Horses for courses!

I don’t hate ALL dm’s, just those that, before even a “hello, how are you”, are sent by a robot without the knowledge of the person being followed. Look at this one from @lorelleonwp, it’s the kind of DM I can receive all day long! it makes me want to visit their profile and see their bio description and what their site is like..

Isn’t that a MUCH nicer DM to receive? I got it part way through writing this post and it restored my faith in twitter and the people that use it again.

The problem for me though is, there are so many people that have a massive following that are using these tools and all their new followers think it’s perfectly acceptable to do it themselves and so the fad continues. It reminds me of MLM marketers who say, “the LIST is EVERYTHING”. They send a gazillion emails out multiple times a week (sometimes multiple times a day) and any network marketer that’s just starting in the biz, thinks that’s what they should do too.

It becomes more about building a list for how much they can make and nought about how much they can help. I think the worth of a follower reduces to zero if all you want is more of them. What for? is it a secret way to riches? does having a gazillion followers make you right?

What do you think? is giving something away for free a pitch? (like CoachDeb’s twitterhandbook) or do you need a bit of gentle tweetplay (like foreplay but with a blue bird watching) before you’ll follow any links or download any software?

I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on using bots to build your twitter following or send messages that you can’t/don’t want to make yourself..I could be completely wrong and alone in my opinion. Let me know!

twitter

6

Why did I just click this link? I got twitter-jacked!

February
12

your tweets or your life!
haha, I saw something quite cool and possibly scary today.

One of the people I follow had a tiny url with message “don’t click” so, of course, I clicked it and was presented with a blank page containing one button. Of course, I clicked that button too but nothing happened… until I saw people replying to me saying “no I didn’t” , turns out that when I clicked the button, I was actually sending the link to my own public timeline!! how? well, some french guy made a post about how to automatically send a tweet acting as the person who clicks a button by using an iframe and some simple css. I don’t know if he was the first twitter jacker but I’m sure he wont be the last!

It’s something that is spreading around twitter. As I type this, “Don’t Click” is a trending topic on twitter search…

The click of the button labeled “don’t click this” was actually the button of Twitter’s home page. You can’t see the rest of the page but when you click (well, most people would!), you are actually clicking on the update button for twitter.

The message is added by urlencoding a message on to the end of the twitter home page, thusly;
http://twitter.com/home?status=
and the urlencoded (changes spaces and other special characters to their hex equivalent) goes after…
I+luv+the+commentluv+plugin%21

As long as you’re logged in to twitter, clicking this link will show a message of my choosing in your own update field. If I used html to insert an iframe into a page with a button I made. All I would have to do is set the opacity of the iframe to 0 and position it so the update button is (invisibly) over the button I put on the page. (don’t worry, I didn’t do any shenanigans with the link above).

I did a quick bash up of some html (lol, no javascript needed) to see if I could do it and, well, it’s a piece of piss really. I decided not to show it to you as a working example because I am pretty sure that the Twitter T.o.S. doesn’t like anything to do with posting on someones behalf by misleading them. (impersonation violation?)

You can read some ways to prevent this from being used against you on this rather fine post.

Another way to detect it, is to have a script that faintly outlines any iframes on the page so you can see if there’s a doin’s goin’ on! I think I smell tomorrow’s project! :-)

(either that or petition Twitter to have frame breaking script on any page that a user has text input and update buttons on).

Blog News

3

Updated wp-twitip-id to final version.

February
11


The beta plugin I made just to see if I could (after @styletime sent me a tweet) has been quite popular, even more so since it got mentioned at Mashable so, I have updated the beta version of WP-Twitip-ID to final version 1.0 which takes care of some issues and makes it much better.

It no longer user custom post fields to store the users’ twitter ID, instead, it uses a new table in the database so a user only has to enter their twitter id once in a comment and all their other comments will show their ID (provided they use the same email address).

I’ve also added a new option to the plugin call to output the most popular way of displaying in the comments. The new command is “auto” and outputs as “Twitter: @commentluv” the username part is a link that opens in a new window and is nofollow. The whole thing is wrapped in a class of “twitter_id” so you can adjust the size of the text and link if you want.

See the plugin page here
http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/wp-twitip-id-plugin-add-a-twitter-field-to-your-comment-form-easily/

I wouldn’t have been able to get this done today if it wasn’t for @clearskynet who was able to answer my question about adding a table to the database. OMG I luv twitter!

also thanks go to @Mobasoft for the weird problem of using str_replace with a POST string containing @

for the geeks,
the twitter id gets posted from the comment form and gets collected by the plugin with $twitter=$_POST['atf_twitter_id'];
I wanted to remove any @ symbol so I used
$twitter_id=str_replace(“@”,”",$twitter);
but for some reason, the @ wouldn’t get removed. It was driving me crazy! I tried all sorts of urlencode, char(64) and so on but no joy. In the end, I got it to work by using str_replace with arrays instead. Now it’s
$search=array(“@”,”http://twitter.com/”);
$replace=array(“”,”");
$twitter_id = str_replace($search,$replace,$twitter);

and that worked! I don’t know why it wouldn’t work with “@” on it’s own. How strange!

Anyway, all is working now and I’m happy with it. You can download it at the plugin page here
http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/wp-twitip-id-plugin-add-a-twitter-field-to-your-comment-form-easily/

Blog News

8

Having an issue with dbDelta to add table to wp db (resolved)

February
11

I’m having some issues with trying to put the WP-Twitip-ID plugin into the final version.

Right now, the beta version stores the twitter ID in the post meta for each post but that’s not really ideal because it can only show the twitter id on the comments of the post that the user has already commented on. New post comments require the user to add their twitter id again. Not too much trouble because if they have entered a twitter id in a previous comment then the plugin sets a cookie on their machine and adds it to the field when they comment again.

What I’d rather do is store the twitter id in the database so it’s accessible outside the post meta. I could store the id’s in wp_options but that would probably cause loading time issues because wp_options values get loaded automatically and considering the amount of comments a blog gets, it would bloat it out massively.

My solution is to create a new table on the database and add the twitter id and email address in there, that way I only have to update the db once when a new twitter id is entered.

The problem I am having is creating the table! for some reason, it’s not adding it. I’ve even copied and pasted another plugins code to do it and it still wont work!

here’s my code :

function atf_install() {
global $wpdb;
global $atf_db_version;
add_option("atf_db_version", $atf_db_version);

$table_name = $wpdb->prefix . "wptwitipid";
if($wpdb->get_var("show tables like '$table_name'") != $table_name) {
$sql = "CREATE TABLE " . $table_name . " (
id mediumint(9) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
email varchar(120) NOT NULL,
twitid varchar(120) NOT NULL,
KEY email (email)
);";
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
dbDelta($sql);
}
}
$atf_db_version = "1.0";
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'atf_install');

There’s a problem with the $atf_db_version too. It adds an option to wp_options for the key of “atf_db_version” but no value and it’s really starting to piss me off!

anyone out there in geek land that can help me here?

Fixed!!

A massive thanks to @clearskynet who answered and solved the problem within minutes of me posting this.

hurray!!

Code, PHP, Wordpress

20

London = sucky sucky!! glad to be moving – video blog post

February
7

Stayed up too late and had a rant about London

London = sucky sucky . glad to be moving from Andy Bailey on Vimeo.

video blogging

19

Wok Wok. Whos there? – Lancaster!

February
4

It’s happened. The decision made. The people told. The place gotten ready.

It’s official, I am going to live oop North in Lancaster. Oh dear me, or actually “ecky thump ladd!” what an exciting/scary/traumatic/intense/happy/fun adventure to be had… Life has dealt me and the missus a hand to play and put us ‘all in’.

The move is happening because “The Fired Wok – Chinese Takeaway and Delivery” will be my home soon along with my (sort of)brother-in-law because, you see, I am going to be part of a completely different business to what I’m used to. :shock:

It’s a massive change for me and I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of hard work, I remember how knackered my missus used to be when she had her last restaurant but, I think, this might be an opportunity to learn some new skills and I’m convinced that this geek can overcome! There’s a website to design of course, how can a business operate without a website to tell everyone where they are and what they do and how much it costs and where they deliver to and what time they stop?

Can’t wait to do that, I know the place has a domain name but it’s been an empty page for over 5 years. Even a single page with phone number, pdf menu and delivery area map could make a HUGE difference if used properly. I shudder to think how many existing customers have not phoned an order because they lost the menu from last time.

There are some other things where I think a bit of Andy Bailey could help..

  • What about a weekly newsletter with special offers just to subscribers?
    Now I have the newsletter software from Octeth, I can put that into action as soon as I’m settled and moved in.
  • What about great customer service from someone that sounds like they want your order?
  • What about proper planning of deliveries, combining those that are on the same route?
  • What about statistical analysis of produce usage and the 80/20 rule, does it work on food?

and so on and so on..

First, I will have to learn the ‘ropes’ (“Rern the lopes!” heh) about all the preparation and other non-geeky things. I suspect I might be called upon to do some fairly menial tasks in the next few months but, I’ve found that hard work and simple labour is cleansing for the mind and a perfect time to come up with “eureka!” ideas, lawd knows how I despise London and all it’s crime and indifference so I’m actually looking forward to the move!

The new site and plugin for CommentLuv is happening at around the same time but I am confident that I can do them both and this move justice if I just get off my arse for a few minutes and put my nose to the grindstone, I’ve done it plenty of times before so I’m not scared (much!).

Once Fiddyp get’s moved to the new platform on CommentLuv I’ll be chronicling the events and changes as and when they happen. I’ve already got my place figured out for where my cam is going to go. Chinese cookery lessons anyone? :-)

Blog News