ShoeMoney challeneged John Chow to a contest to see who could get the most moneyfrom the Cashinator at the Market Leverage booth. The winner would get all the cash and the loser would have to throw in an additional $100 from his own pocket. In the eleventh hour, Tyler Cruz and Zac Johnson joined in and they decided that they would all jump in together and the losers would give the cash and $100 each from their own pocket to the winner to give away on his blog to a reader.
Tyler won and his prize was the unmanagable stack of cash seen above.
Yesterday, I stopped by the ML booth and was asked if I was going to jump in the Cashinator. Why not? After a short lunch, I haded back and found myself in the shower of money, trying to grab all I could. I came out with a small bundle of bills, and John was getting ready to go in, himself. He said he’d give his away on his site and I told him to throw mine in to the prize pool, too. He also decided to throw in the $28 he got from an earlier cash grab. Added to his $19 and my $20, the total is $67 and it’s easy for you to win.
How to win
Head to John’s blog post and leave a comment for an entry. If you want 5 entries, just blog about this contest and send a trackback and he’ll give you five entries. He said he will draw the winner this Saturday at Dot Com Pho.
This is pretty cool. Think Geek has announced a new shirt that features a picture of a drum set. When you tap the drum set pieces, they make the expected sounds. Watch the video. It’s pretty cool.
From ThinkGeek:
We could do what those other supposedly geeky apparel companies do, and print a regular t-shirt with a cool looking picture of a drum kit on the front because it looks fashionable. We then would tell stories about how it was trendy, make a few Rock Band references, tell you it will make you look hot and basically try to convince you to buy it. But we don’t roll like that. At ThinkGeek we know you expect innovative new products and we’re here to pony up the goods. So, how about an electronic t-shirt with both a cool picture and an actual playable drum kit on the front? That’s right. Hit the drums on this shirt with your fingers and they play through the built in speaker… simple but amazing. With 7 different drum sounds you’re ready for a personal drum solo on your chest.
Now you just have to keep your drunk from bruising you up every time you wear it.
A few hours ago, I was sitting at my office and thought that it would be nice if I could easily display my latest Twitter replies (or “tweets at me”) on my blog. Then I remembered that I had been wanting to create an actual WordPress plugin, so I began writing code and pulling a couple bits from my TwitterTech code.
After a short break for dinner, I’ve completed Tweets @ Me, a little plugin for WordPress that lets you display your replies.
Install it
So you want to skip all the reading and jump right in, eh? Before you do, you should be aware of a couple very important things. First, you need to know that if you don’t make sure your tm_tweets.txt and tm_last.txt files are world writable (chmod 777), it will not work properly. If you need help with that, ask your hosting provider. Also, the first time it is loaded it will send a tweet from you about itself. This will only happen once (unless your tm_last.txt file is not writable). If you want to turn this off, feel free to see the configuration options section below. If you appreciate my work and want to share it, leave this feature on or turn it off and send out a tweet manually.
To install (I like Edit+ for config files):
1. Open and edit tm_config.inc.php. You must provide your Twitter.com username and password .
2. Upload the “tweetsatme” folder to your WordPress plugins directory
3. Chmod 777 the two .txt files Very important!
4. Log in to your blog’s admin panel and activate the plugin from the Plugins page.
5. Add the following line in your template:
<?php display_tweets_at_me(); ?>
6. Visit your blog to see it in action.
Why do this?
It’s a similar principal to the “recent comments” plugins we’ve seen everywhere. You display the recent replies as incentive for people to leave you more replies.
How does it work?
It’s pretty simple, really. It logs in once per hour and grabs all Twitter replies sent to you. It then displays the last five to your blog. You can add (or remove) it easily and can customize the configuration and style to your liking.
Configuration Options
Username [twitter username] : You need this to grab your replies.
Password [twitter password] : You need this to grab your replies.
To Display [5/any number] : This is the number of replies to display on your blog.
Announce [yes/no] : If set you “yes”, the plugin will send out the tweet the first time it’s loaded in your blog.
Debug [no/yes] : If set you “yes”, it will continue to grab new tweets and re-write the display HTML every time it is loaded. The most likely reason you would need to set this to “yes” is to see style changes as you make them. Just remember to set it back to “no” when you’re done so the plugin can cache your replies.
Seconds [3600/any number above 60] : This is the number of seconds to wait between getting replies again. It’s set to 3600 (one hour) by default because Twitter imposes a limit to how many API calls your username can make per hour. Keep this number above 60 if you want this plugin to work all the time. If you get any less than one reply per hour, be nice to twitter and leave it at 3600.
Style Options
Width [130/any number] : This is the width of the plugin.
Margin [0px/any number] : If you don’t know, leave it alone.
Padding [3px/any number] : If you don’t know, leave it alone.
Border-Top [0px dashed #ff0000/css border] : If you don’t know, leave it alone.
Border-Right [0px dashed #ff0000/css border] : If you don’t know, leave it alone.
Border-Bottom [0px dashed #ff0000/css border] : If you don’t know, leave it alone.
Border-Left [0px dashed #ff0000/css border] : If you don’t know, leave it alone.
Divider [(blank)/some html] : This is any HTML you would like between replies displayed like a line or image.
Font-Size [10/any number] : This is the font size of the text.
Font-Color [#000000/any color] : This is the color of the text.
BG1 [#ffffff/any color] : This is the background color of replies.
BG2 [#c2c2c2/any color] : This is alternating the background color of replies.
Questions?
Please feel free to post questions below or via email. I’ll answer as quickly as possible. I hate when I install software and can’t get support, so I’ll do my best to come through for you.
Also, any version updates, etc. will be posted here.
Thanks
The only reason I was able to make such quick work of this plugin is the classes I had at my fingertips. So big fat thanks go out to the following people for the classes:
* @author Michal Migurski (JSON class)
* @author Matt Knapp (JSON class)
* @author Brett Stimmerman (JSON class)
* @author Nick Beam (Twitter class)
One of the things Blog World provides plenty of is new products and software with amazing claims of greatness. There are some that I think look good enough to check out further, and some that I don’t, but there’s rarely any that I feel have hit a home run. Zemanta may be one of those. I say “may be”, because it’s a tool that assists you with finding photos and related articles to link to based on your content, as well as tags for your post, so this very post IS the review and we’ll all know how well it worked by the end of the post. Of course, the post is about blogging tools, so I’ll add in some content about why you might need a blogging tool to help you with your posts.
Find me some photos
One of the biggest problems I find while blogging is how hard it can be to find visual media to accompany my posts. If, for example, I’m writing this post about writing tools, I would probably want pictures of writing implements, note pads, maybe a keyboard or a laptop. The laptop might be my preference because that’s what I’m using to write this post. So if I type “laptop” a couple times in my post, what might I get photos of? Let’s see….
[there WAS an image of a ball park here]
OK… Maybe Euphamisms mess up the algorithm a bit, but this was just one of 9 suggested on the first page of results in my new blog post side bar. The photos included one of a laptop that I could use and a couple others that were completely not relevant. The more I type, the better my selections become. For example, when I refresh my selection, I now find another laptop that I like better.
[there WAS another image here of a keyboard]
It’s close enough. I don’t like how it throws the photo kind of randomly into my post text. Sometimes it’s where I expect it and sometimes it’s at the top of my post.
Let’s get some links!
It seems that if you add a link like the one above, it removes your images, which I consider a serious flaw in the the fireflox plugin version of the Zemanta software.
Maybe the SEO tags work?
I think it moved my link, too. I can’t tell anymore. It did give me some good tags to add, and there’s some OK images to choose from, which will save you time, but it’s more hassle than it is useful if it’s going to mangle all of its own progress.
What’s the conclusion?
I still think it’s a genius idea and will be very helpful to me if it really works. I will give it one more shot with a future post and see how it does. If it still fails, it’ll be uninstalled until some things get fixed. The upside is that I’ve installed the FireFox plugin, so if the verdict is failure, I’ll just remove the plugin. A few other blogs seem to have had better luck than me, so try it out for yourself and let me know.
NOTE: Any missing or displaced links and/or images are intentionally left that way to preserve the results of my testing and are the product of the testing.
UPDATE: Oh look at that… The link is embedded in the content. That’s actually very handy.
My first full day at BlogWorld couldn’t have been better. Michelle and I headed down for breakfast and then I headed out to grab my badge. While waiting for the exhibitor floor to open up, Ian Fernando joined me and we got caught up on our plans for the day’s panels. There were a lot of booths to hit, so I just started from one end of the room and began working my way across, skipping those that didn’t interest me and stopping to talk (sometimes at length) with people at booths that caught my eye. One of those was mindtouch, a collaborative wiki system that I am told is much more intuitive than others and can be integrated with WordPress easily. I don’t know that I’m really sold on it since I’m not much of a wiki guy, but I’ll check it out. One program that looks very interesting is Zemanta. The name isn’t the easiest to remember, but the idea is great. Zemanta integrates with WordPress to ease the process of finding photos, videos, and other artcles related to what you’re writing about. The way it was explained to me, it analyzes the text of the post you’re writing and suggests content and links for you as you type, and all the content is Creative Commons friendly. I haven’t tried it yet, but if it lives up to its promise, it should save bloggers a lot of time as well as help the artistic community promote their CC photos and videos. I’ll do a full review when I retrurn to Phoenix. While wandering around the expo floor, I was stopped my a couple people who recognized me, which is always nice. I would have loved to chat more, but I had booths to see.
Ian and I met back up and headed to the panel full of name-dropees, John Chow, ShoeMoney, ProBlogger (Darren Rowse), Copy Blogger (Brian Clark), Zac Johnson, and Jim Kukral. As always, it was full of useful information, and has inspired some small changes I’ll be making to this blog in the near future. This “super panel”, was so popular, in fact, that people were having a hard time pulling themselves away and eventually people had to be reminded that there was another panel scheduled for the room. Before the panel began, I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of my readers, NikNik and Reggie from MyTechOponion. I also had an opportunity to show Jim, the damage I’ve done to my Flip in preparation for the upgrade I’m doing (expect that post soon).
Just before Ian joined me and Michelle for lunch, he let me know that Michelle and I were invited to the Market Leverage dinner at Envy that the super affiliate bloggers were going to. In attendance were the panelists mentioned above as well as a few people who won seats at the dinner, a couple more affilliates, and of course, Deb, Mike, and Jen from Market Leverage. The dinner was almost as great as the opportunity to sit down with some of the blogging elite. John posted pictures of the dinner and all the food, as expected.
The BlogWorld Opening Day party ended at 9:30, so everyone at the dinner missed that, and many of us ended up at the Tempo bar at the Hilton. Shortly after that, Ian, Michelle, the ML crew and I all headed to the Wynn, where we spent the rest of the night at Blush, drinking and dancing.
If you want to see all the photos I took, they’re on Flickr. Day one was awesome, and although I think today will be more relaxed, I’m sure I’ll get just as much out of it.
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