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Facebook Vanity URLs

March 13, 2009 By 3 Comments

image My partner Stephen sent me a tweet he saw this morning about Facebook vanity URLs.  Now, I typically spend about an hour or two in the evenings inside the Facebook Developers area and this was the first time that I had heard anything about it.

I searched the forums and didn’t see not one single mention about them, but it’s true they do exist for a few folks that Facebook has apparently brought in to help them test this offering before it goes public.  Just like anything that is tied in w/ Facebook, you can bet that whatever this vanity URL service turns out the be, we are all going to want it…

Facebook is getting wise to something MySpace has known from the start – users love vanity URLs. When you tell someone your MySpace page, you just say myspace.com/[user/brand/band/etc.] (I’m myspace.com/mikearrington). On Facebook it has always been more difficult.

My profile isn’t Facebook.com/michaelarrington, it’s facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899. Not so catchy, and the result is people need to do searches to find you. MySpace vanity URLs are popular for the same reason people like domain names instead of just typing in IP addresses.

Facebook’s policy on this is clearly changing, at least for Pages (where bands, celebrities, brands, etc. have their Facebook presence). Facebook has always had a few vanity URLs associated with Pages, like Facebook.com/U2. They made it clear last August, though, that most people couldn’t get them:

Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs. The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future. When this feature is available, we will provide instructions on how to obtain a vanity URL at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=60. We apologize for any inconvenience in the mean time.

Now, though, Facebook seems to be letting more people have vanity URLs. Kevin Rose celebrated getting one earlier today, for example. Ashton Kutcher also has one, as does Demi Moore. The TechCrunch Page, alas, does not (hover over that link, whoa).

Facebook Getting Serious About Vanity URLs

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What are #hashtags?

March 12, 2009 By 3 Comments

2129147691_3cebe06e54_m I would rather try to explain Global Warming as opposed to Twitter, but I find myself doing it almost daily.  Now, it seems that Twitter is just about a household name, especially since Jay Leno went on for 30 minutes about it last night.  I don’t know if any other social network has ever experienced rapid growth like Twitter has experienced over the past 12 months or so, it’s incredible.

In addition to the “what is twitter?” question I get almost 4 times daily, I also have a lot of people ask me about #hashtags and why we use these for keywords like #nascar #arkansas #php or #wordpress.  Instead of trying to explain what they are, I found a good explanation of their purpose and usage on hashtags.org today and thought I would pass it along:

Hashtags was designed to accommodate the real-time news community. We provide analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what’s happening now.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

To get a better idea as to how #hashtags are used I recommend checking out #hashtags  website.  Also, just a note, we are going to be using the #UR09 hashtag this weekend during the Unlimited Realm Conference at The Church Alive, if you are on Twitter and are following along this weekend, be sure to drop us a tweet…

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Blogging: Getting Started

March 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

I have a lot of inspiration for this post because I just got finished listening to ShoeMoney’s webinar for the second time about monetization and it has got me pretty excited.  Well, actually it’s a combination of ShoeMoney’s webinar and some actual results that my partners and i have been seeing on our first online property, NascarView. 

In just a few weeks we have been able to launch the main NascarView website, which consisted of a WordPress Blog / News type theme and a message board.  In just 2 weeks we have already got about 120 members on the board.  Granted, these are not big numbers, but we are just getting started.  Our primary outlets for marketing the project have been Facebook and Twitter. Just so you know, I have been directing my clients toward these two social networks for a while now and have seen some awesome results from both in terms of promotion and community growth.

In ShoeMoney’s webinar he had 4 bullet points for Getting Started:

  • What’s your passion?
  • Focus on building your content.
  • You don’t need Google.
  • Don’t kill your website before it gets started.

I am only going to touch on the first two points in this post.

What’s your passion? 

For me this is easy, NASCAR is clearly one of my passions.  Not only is it a passion but I have had the privilege of working with some drivers and high profile clients inside the industry so it’s a great mix of business and pleasure. 

Focus on building your content.

Jeremy brings up a good point on this though and it should be noted that if you are going to build a successful website it is going to take work, sometimes a lot of work before you actually see any results from it.  In doing so you are going to have to focus on adding content.  This is a lot easier said than done sometimes.  It really helps if the point of your website is something that you are very passionate about.  It will act as a motivational tool to help spur you on to add more content.

In closing, these two points are probably no-brainers to a lot of you that have been in the industry for a while but I think that it’s a great idea to re-emphasize them and apply them to personal projects that you might have going on the side as well.  I think that sometimes we, as developers, build so many projects that we sometimes get wrapped up on the mechanics and forget to pay attention to the big picture.  Also, this is information that I share with my clients on a day to day basis when approached for advise regarding startups.

If you are interested, here’s a great blog post w/ an excerpt from Jeremy’s webinar on video, click here.

Filed Under: Monetization, Social Media / Web 2.0, Web Development Tagged With:

ShoeMoney® Monetization Webinar

March 11, 2009 By 1 Comment

shoemoney-logo2 My partner Greg and I sat in on Jeremy Shoemaker’s webinar last night that was put out by Big Jason Henderson and Big Marketing and it was awesome!!  After the webinar ShoeMoney did a 90 minute Q&A and it was very informative.  The video from the first part of the webinar is available online at ShoeMoney’s blog here.

There are a lot of guys out there that are so called Monetization experts but ShoeMoney is the real deal in my opinion, and I have been in this industry a while and can usually spot a flake when I see one.  If you own or operate a blog and have considered monetization for your blog, I recommend checking out ShoeMoney, he is one of the few “experts” out there that I recommend.

Blog Monetization Preso Video – ShoeMoney®

Filed Under: Monetization Tagged With: ,

Cover it Live Chat + Twitter…

March 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

CoverItLive_Logo

My business partners and I have been using Cover it Live software to run our live racing chat on NascarView.com since the season started and I have to say we really like it a lot.  Not only does the software allow for visitors to chat with one another in real time during the races, but it also gives you the ability to incorporate Twitter into your live events. 

If you want to see this software in action, checkout our Live Racing Chat during the Nascar Cup series races. I got this message today from Cover it Live and thought that it was worth sharing, apparently their software is growing in popularity! 

Last year at this time we were sending these updates to around 2,000 registered users of CiL.  Today, it’s over 25,000 including everyone from regional television stations, to niche bloggers to global media companies.  Thank you for your continued support and feedback.

Some new features have been rolled out over the past month so I thought I would point them out to those of you who are interested:

Panelists no longer require CiL accounts:  Many of you have ‘one-time guests’ on your events and found it cumbersome to have them register with CoveritLive.  This has been removed and they now have the option of signing in as ‘Guests’ if they do not want to register with us.  We still require this for Producers because it provides more security for you given all the things we allow Producers to do during an event.

The limit on Producers and Panelists has been raised from 10 to 25:  A small portion of users wanted a few more contributors so we raised the limit to well beyond what most people asked for.

The limit on unmoderated (what we call ‘Always Allow’) readers has been raised from 10 to 25:  Same reason as above.  Moving to a completely open environment might sound like a good idea…but we need to be very careful with the development of that product feature so you don’t all spend your time ‘whacking’ unwanted ‘contributors’.  More on that in the coming months.

Add contributors on the fly:  by clicking on the ‘Always Allow’ icon during an event, you can instantly turn a reader into a Panelist or Producer.

The Scoreboard:  A simple but effective way to keep an updated score for your readers at the bottom of your Viewer Window.  Run as many as you like to keep them up to date on any number of events.  There are options for classic Team v. Team games or Race/Standings where you need to show readers a ranking.  Use it and no reader will come in and ask, "What’s the score?" again.

The News Flash:  In the same place as the Scoreboard feature in the Console.  This lets you create important entries that display at the bottom of the Viewer Window and stay where your readers can always see them.

RSS Feeds:  RSS feeds aren’t the most exciting things in the world but with a little creativity, you can use them to provide up to the second listings of your live events, or pull your CiL content onto a television screen or set up an ‘auto-Tweet’ every time you launch a new event or put your content into another format for SEO benefits. 
We offer three feeds:  An Event feed with all the content from a specific event; a Writer feed which provides a list of all upcoming, live and completed events; and, an Enterprise feed which is like the Writer feed except it provides a listing of all events from all writers included in your Enterprise account.  There are hundreds of good third party RSS applications that can do all kinds of interesting things with these feeds.  We had one that ran a ticker along a blog page with all the content from a live event.  That was pretty cool.

‘Smart’ Autoscroll:  Readers can now scroll up to read earlier entries without having to toggle the autoscroll button.  The autoscroll will activate when they are reading current content and leave them alone if they are reading older content.

Sports Pack in Media Library:  To highlight the usefulness of the Media Library, we populated it with some sports sounds (buzzers, whistles) and images (yellow card, baseball umpires) so all of you could see that with a little effort, you could put some commonly used items in there for your own use.  Think about your team’s fight song or stock images you would want at your fingertips.

New investor and advisor:  We are very pleased to now have Dan Gould as an investor in our company.  Dan is VP, Technology at Fox Interactive Media (the parent company of MySpace, FAN, IGN, and FoxSports.com).  He previously founded Corridor, the first modern social network, and Newroo, which was acquired by News Corp.

Thank you all again for your support and feedback.  Look forward to hearing from many of you soon.

Thank you.

Keith McSpurren
President, CoveritLive

COVERITLIVE.COM – Home

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: ,

Change the Web Challenge

March 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

change-the-web-challenge-logo-sm The Change the Web Challenge is a contest to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other type of application that helps people find and share opportunities and to take action.  The grand prize for the challenge is 50 benjis (and I don’t have a clue how much that equates to in USD), and the best WordPress plugin will be featured in the plugin directory. Click here for all the details. 

If you are interested, I found a post on the WordPress blogs this morning about writing your own plugin in case you anyone is interested.  Don’t forget, you can also take the existing source code for a plugin that’s already out there and tweak it to make it better as well. 

There are several plugins out there that could use some modifications if you decide to go this route.  If that’s the case, and you have some spare time on your hands, drop me a note, I have 2 plugins that I need to finish tweaking and would be more than happy to hand off to someone to wrap up for me…

“Writing a Plugin” in the WordPress Codex is where I got started when I needed to get hooked in to WordPress. Others might like to grab one of the over 4,000 open source WordPress plugins and tweak the source. If in need of a little help, the Plugins and Hacks forum is full of friends to assist you wrap your head around the code or debug a problem. Social Actions also has provided some developer resources.

WordPress › Blog » Change the Web Challenge

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0, Web Development, Wordpress™ Tagged With:

Combine Multiple RSS Feeds into One

March 9, 2009 By 3 Comments

Note: Due to the high costs of hosting these types of services online, a lot of these providers referenced below have either gone away or are doing paid type of solutions, there is one however that is still available for free that I found, www.rssmix.com

I ran across some cool tools today that allow you to mix together multiple RSS feeds into one feed.  This is particularly handy if you want to aggregate multiple feeds into one place on your website.  In wordpress this can free up a lot of space in your sidebar!

Here are 10 tools that I ran across, would love to know if there are any other ones out there, if so, please be sure to post a comment to let me know…

1. RSS Mixer -Just enter the multiple RSS feed URLs and title for the resultant feed and click on Mix it button. You will get RSS feed mixed up of all the individual RSS feeds. You can use resultant RSS feed in number of formats like: Apple Dashboard Widget, Web Widget to embed in a webpage, an iPhone formatted version of your mix etc.

2. FeedBlendr -Very easy to use online service for blending or combining of multiple feed. Enter the URLs of feeds that you want to combine and Click on ‘Blend Your Feed’ button. No Registration or download is required to blend feeds. You get output in the form of: RSS/Atom output, HTML link, (.m) link, OPML output and Javascript code. Read More about FeedBlendr…

3. FeedTwister - It allows you to mix your favorite feeds and show their latest posts on your website.Create as many lists of feeds as you want and add up to 50 feeds per list. You can also assign an image to each feed and order posts by date or title. Limit the posts shown and establish a posts per source maximum.

4. BlogSieve -It is a free web-based tool that creates new feeds by filtering, merging and sorting existing feeds. The BlogSieve engine accepts virtually every (valid) feed format, processed results are then exported into any feed format you choose.

5. RSSMesh -The rssMesh.php script allows you to produce an RSS feed by taking the latest items from multiple feeds. The RSSmesh configuration is controlled by a configuration file for each feed to be produced.

6. RSS Mix - Mix any number of RSS feeds into one unique new feed. Mix up any feed of your choice using easy web based interface. To create a new RSS Mix, copy and paste the URLs of the existing source feeds into the box below and hit Create.

7. BlastFeed -It is an on-line service that lets you aggregate, remix and filter RSS feeds. And Blastfeed can immediately notify you of any results of such filtering. Blastfeed will only collect items that match your criteria in each feed. The results will be amalgamated into a single file and sent to you by email, Instant Messaging or as a new RSS feed, when and where you want it.

8. Feed Combine - As the name suggests, it allows you to combine feeds in a seamless manner. It your instant mashed-up feed using Feed Combine.

9. FrankenFeed -It is an open source application written using Ruby on Rails. This application can merge multiple RSS or ATOM feeds (xml) into a single master feed. The idea is to allow a power RSS or ATOM user to manage a single feed for a novice RSS or ATOM user.

10. Yahoo Pipes - Saving best for the last. Problem with these online feed blenders is – they come and go. Yahoo Pipes is the most stable option for simple reason, it is from YAHOO! It can be bit confusing for a newbie, however once you get hold of things – it works like charm.

» 10 Tools to Combine, Mix, Blend Multiple RSS Feeds

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0, Web Development, Wordpress™ Tagged With: , ,

Facebook Founder Joins Twitter

March 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

twitter-logo Some of you might remember last may when Facebook attempted to by Twitter for $500 million dollars in Facebook employee stock.  Well, Facebook is obviously paying closer attention to twitter than a lot of us thought, apparently Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg has setup his own public twitter profile. 

Apparently he has had his own private profile for a while now but only recently launched the public profile.  I really like Facebook in terms of social networking and marketing value for my clients but here’s the thing, I am not for sure why people would associate the two as being competitors?  Both are social networks yes, but they provide a totally different service and value to the web in my opinion.  Here’s an article about Zuckerburg’s twitter account:

Zuckerberg, who has had a private profile on the site since last May, has now launched a public profile, which has already attracted more than 9,200 followers.

Facebook famously tried to buy Twitter last year for around $500 million in stock. But Peter Thiel, a director at Facebook and an investor in the social networking site, said that it soon became “pretty clear” a deal would not be done. It is thought the two companies disagreed on the price and the future structure of the company.

Zuckerberg has been a long-time admirer of the microblogging service. Last week, he announced changes to the Facebook home page that included real-time status updates, bringing the social networking site more in line with Twitter’s constant stream of tweets. He said that organisations such as MySpace and Twitter were “companies we admire”.

Facebook has also removed the 5,000-friend limit it has imposed on users, and has pledged to make the site more open, with people able to build acquaintance networks in the same way they can on Twitter without having to actually open their profiles up to followers.

Mark Zuckerberg is not yet following Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey or Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter, on his public profile, but is connected to them on his private Twitter feed.

Facebook founder joins Twitter – Telegraph

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Common Internet Exploder Issues

March 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

internet_explorer_7_logo I had the opportunity to have coffee this morning with an awesome guy, Darren Huckey, of MonstorGraphix and during our conversation this morning we got to talking about Internet Explorer, or as those of us in the industry call it, Internet Exploder… 

Internet Explorer has long been a thorn in the side of the web development community for a number of reasons, some of these reasons you can find highlighted in a note that Darren tagged me in this morning on facebook.  This was a pretty good list of complaints so I thought it was definitely worthy of reposting.

What can you the web surfer do to help eliminate these problems for us?  You can download and install Mozilla Firefox as your default web browser!!!  It will render the web a lot better for you, not to mention is about twice as fast!

This is not an original list. This is a list originally created by Aleksandar Vacić being re-posted from this url: http://aplus.rs/?s=xplorer+z-index+bug
However, it pulled on my heart strings so much that I had to re-post. FYI, check out the original post to view all of the documented links for each of these. In no particular order…

  • PNG alpha transparency broken.
  • Broken float model.
  • Missing text, aka Peek-a-boo.
  • Pseudo-element extra-space needed.
  • Duplicate character with adjacent floats.
  • Broken margins on floats.
  • Phantom box.
  • 3px text jog.
  • Missing first-letter.
  • Creeping text.
  • Doubling margin on floats.
  • Float boxes running-away.
  • Ignoring font-sizes inside of tables.
  • Missing images if saved in Mac’s Photoshop 7.
  • Not caching images loaded from CSS, thus introducing flicker (really annoying over SSL).
  • Randomly loose images loaded from CSS, without realizing that.
    Not supporting the best thing that ever happened to web design: CSS2 selectors.
  • Not supporting DOM2 Events.
  • Not supporting position:fixed.
  • Not being able to resize the only true screen measurement unit: pixels.
  • Not supporting max-width and min-width.
  • Not supporting :hover on any element. Count here all other pseudo-classes.
  • Not being able to prototype existing HTML elements
  • z-index phone book. I know. I hate every one of you responsible for this behavior. MS or other.
  • Not giving “document ready” state when .swf file is missing and loaded with object tag (thus all your window.onload scripts never execute).

This is not the full list. Just things that troubles me almost every day.

Facebook | Darren Huckey’s Notes

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With:

City Council Member Rips One!

March 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

I am not for sure what city this is, but you have to know that the people in attendance were rolling on the floor when this city council member decided that he couldn’t hold it in any longer and ripped not one but two during a city council budget hearing.  It was so funny that the other council members joined in laughing at him and they had to go to a short recess so that everyone could gain their composure.  


City Council Member Farts During Hearing – Watch more Funny Videos

City Council Member Farts During Hearing Video

Filed Under: Funny
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