This has been an interesting week online. On 12/16 Facebook accidentally rolled out an internal prototype for fan pages that through people into fits and Yahoo! announced that it was discontinuing delicious (but maybe not) and other services. Well, it wasn’t announced, the information as leaked.

This week I have Facebook, weird animals, freelancer dreams, delicious, and Rudolph’s red light.

Enjoy!

• How to Delete Your Facebook Applications – Since Facebook keeps moving the settings around, this article is very useful.
• Ten Weirdest New Animals of 2010 – Wow! These are some bizarre animals and photos.
• 9 online petition tools: How to make a difference – Excellent list of resources for starting a petition to get people interested in your cause.
• 17 paypal alternatives for easier e-commerce – Don’t like paypal or have trouble with them? Here is a list of alternatives.
• 12 Gifts Most Freelance Designers Only Dare to Dream About – I’d have to go with #12 on this list, although most of my clients are awesome.
• Mapping America: Every City, Every Block – Put in your zipcode and find out how diverse (or not) your neighborhood is.
• Facebook Launch New Business Page Designs – Well, Facebook accidentally and briefly launched new page designs. Apparently they rolled out an internal prototype. It was a mistake and they took the site down to revert back to the original pages. The reason I am still listing this article is that I believe this is where Facebook is going with pages.
• Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them – Yahoo was shutting down delicious, no wait they are going to sell it instead. Who knows but Yahoo! is the place where good products go to die. And for me, delicious is more that a bookmarking service. It’s also a place for discovery and research.
• Rudolphe v Roxanne Mashup
  
• Doctor Who v Star Wars Mashup
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Lists 12/19/10

Why back in the dark ages of this site I wrote an article about how to create a delicious bookmarks page. This is a page with a piece of javascript provided by delicious and is pulling my bookmarks that are tagged with WordPress.

Well, call me dense but there is a WordPress function called Fetch Feed that can be used to do the same thing and can actually be used to pull any RSS feed to your templates without the use of a plugin.

Sometimes I wonder why it takes me so long to notice things like this. I guess I don’t really study everything WordPress can do unless I am specifically searching for a solution.

Anyway, I was going through my feed reader, which is a rare occurrence these days, and came across this article about adding a flickr gallery to WordPress without a plugin. And I thought, “why didn’t I realize this function existed?” and “what could I use it for?”

I realized it was a perfect alternative for listing bookmarks rather than using the delicious snippet of javascript.

The code provided by the Codex as an example is the following:

<h2><?php _e('Recent news from Some-Other Blog:'); ?></h2>
<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed.php');

// Get a SimplePie feed object from the specified feed source.
$rss = fetch_feed('http://example.com/rss/feed/goes/here');

// Figure out how many total items there are, but limit it to 5.
$maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(5); 

// Build an array of all the items, starting with element 0 (first element).
$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
    <?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '<li>No items.</li>';
    else
    // Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
    foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
    <li>
        <a href='<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>'
        title='<?php echo 'Posted '.$item->get_date('j F Y | g:i a'); ?>'>
        <?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a>
    </li>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Now I’m sure you’re all thinking, “Ok. That’s great Kim. Thanks for throwing that load of goop at us.” But, it will work fine with most templates and only two parts of it need to be changed.

1. Change Recent news from Some-Other Blog to a title that makes sense.
   

   <h2><?php _e('Recent news from Some-Other Blog:'); ?></h2>
   

2. And you put the url to your feed where it says http:http://example.com/rss/feed/goes/here
   

   // Get a SimplePie feed object from the specified feed source.
   $rss = fetch_feed('http://example.com/rss/feed/goes/here');
   

3. You can also change the number of items that are pulled by the feed but that isn’t necessary. Change the 5 to the number of items that you want.
   

   // Figure out how many total items there are, but limit it to 5.
   $maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(5);
   

When I started this post I mentioned using fetch feed to pull delicious bookmarks. I got the rss feed for my bookmarks with the tag wordpress and placed it in the footer of this page. If you scroll down to the bottom you will see the result of the code in the footer. This could be used in sidebar widget, if you are also using a plugin like Exec-PHP that allows code in text widgets or you could create a custom page template to display feeds.

Can you think of interesting uses for this? So far, I’ve been thinking about a custom news page or a custom lifestream page that pulls in feed from the social networking sites that you use.

Sidenote: I used to have a cat that would fetch. If I shot a rubber band across the room, she would chase it, pick it up in her mouth and bring it back to me so I would throw it again.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Add a RSS Feed Without a Plugin Using the WordPress Fetch Feed Function

For the first (Anti) Social List of 2010 I have computer help, WordPress, being nice to your Webmaster, muppets, your three rights, and more.

Enjoy!

• Why It’s Better to Pretend You Don’t Know Anything About Computers – More hilarity from The Oatmeal. I’ve been laughing over this one since I first saw it. Miffles!!
• Top WordPress Hacks of 2009 – A great list of WordPress hacks and code snippets.
• Why Should You Be Nice to Your Webmaster – It’s a sad state of affairs for Third Base Brewery (if this is even real – I think it is).
• 101 Muppets of Sesame Street – A visual guide to the muppets of Sesame Street
• Garbage City: An Unbelievable Real Life Urban Wasteland – People actually live here. It’s outside of Cairo.
• WP Sauce – Listing of articles tagged with WordPress on Delicious.
• An Engineer’s Guide to Cat Yodeling – funny!
  
• Know Your Rights by The Clash
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Lists 1/3/10

Two weeks I encouraged you to spring clean WordPress by making backups, upgrading, removing unused plugins and more. I have finally decided to take my own advice and have done some (Anti) Social Spring Cleaning.

I hate to admit it but I often give advice before I actually follow it myself. But there, I’ve admitted it. Between writing articles and working on other’s sites, maintenance on my own site often falls to the bottom of my todo list.

So, here’s a list of the the spring cleaning I did here at (Anti) Social Development.

1. Upgrade to 2.7.1 – I was still on 2.7. I wanted to upgrade but the auto-upgrade doesn’t work with my host and I didn’t have a block of time to do a manual upgrade until recently. It’s really nice to not be looking at the upgrade notice at the top of my WordPress screen.
2. Removed Unused Plugins – I had a couple of plugins installed that I wasn’t using. I kept them around because I thought that I might need them again but finally decided to delete them.
3. Upgraded All Plugins – I had 5 or 6 plugins that needed to be upgraded. One of them was cforms – I always put that one off because it just seems like too much work. I had two plugins that didn’t want to be upgraded through WordPress so I upgraded them manually. Well, cforms was also upgraded manually – it’s the best contact form but it’s fussy.
4. Updated my contact page – I added a little bit of text above the contact form and social networking icons and links. I think it’s more user-friendly now and prettier.
5. Updated sidebar on blog – I have different sidebars on my blog and on my services/about/portfolio pages. I updated the blog sidebar to include social networking links and icons in the Get (Anti) Social area. I also added a Facebook badge, which I’m not sure I’m going to keep. I still want to do more to this sidebar but, again, can’t decide on what exactly that is.
6. Updated other sidebar – I updated the sidebar on the services/about/portfolio pages. I added 2 new reviews of my work and changed the colors of the review block. I’m still not happy with it but can’t seem to make a decision.
7. Bookmarking Links – I removed the Sociable plugin and added the Tweet This plugin to the bottom of my posts. I decided to use the buttons for Twitter, StumbleUpon and Delicious because those are the networks I am most active on. Feel free to use them ;-) I’m thinking about adding Facebook Connect but am still mad at the new facebook.
8. Portfolio – I added two sites and testimonials to my Portfolio page. (I also removed one because the link to the site was bad). I’ve been doing work for Manshu at OneMint since last fall. He wrote an awesome review for me so I added him to the site. I also completed one of my biggest projects to date at Socialize Mobilize. Lisa also wrote a really great review so I just had to add it.
9. LinkedIn – I did a little bit of work in my LinkedIn profile, added new contacts, and got three new recommendations! Feel free to connect with me.

This reduced my site todo list considerably. There is still a lot I would like to do but I am pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far.

I also found solutions to some annoying WordPress problems that I’ve been having. But those are just SO special you’ll have to wait for the individual articles.

So, what about you? What WordPress spring cleaning did you do on your sites?

photo credit: sidewalk_story

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social WordPress Spring Cleaning

The first couple of months that I had this site I only had one visitor. Well, only one that I knew of. So many of my articles went unloved and unread.

It’s not that the articles are SO bad. Well, maybe just a little – my writing has definitely improved. It’s just that no one knew they existed. They were out there all alone floating about the Internet.

Since I’ve been highlighting articles from the past, such as 5 WordPress articles and 5 Twitter articles, I decided to showcase 5 unpopular articles. Maybe they will find a little love now.

I should note that my criteria for selecting articles were ones with no comments. It’s entirely possible that they were wildly popular and that the readers were so stunned by my brilliance that they were unable to comment.

1. Shared Netvibes Page as Lifestream – When I first started this site I thought one of my main topics was going to be lifestreaming because I’m very interested in it. I wrote a number of articles on the topic but quickly tired of it and there are others, like Mark Krynsky who are covering the topic is a more complete manner. But Netvibes as a shared lifestream? Why? Actually, I just took a look at it and it does show what I’m going online with photos, bookmarking, videos, etc so maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all.
2. Fav Thumbs – Visualize Your Delicious Bookmarks – This is a review of Fav Thumbs, which is a visual representation of Delicious Bookmarks. It’s pretty cool but I’ve never really used it and it’s slower than just searching the regular ones.
3. Time Tube by Dipity – A YouTube Timeline – I’m not sure what else to say about this one – the title basically says what it is. You can create a timeline of YouTube videos with a search, by manually entering them or with a RSS feed. I created one of Mirror’s Edge videos because that is a video game that I have been looking forward to even though I know it will frustrate me to no end. And yes, I know the game is out but the PC version isn’t being released until January.
4. Get Invited: 4 Ways to Obtain Access to Beta Sites – I’m really not sure why I even wrote articles back them – the titles provided plenty of information. For awhile last summer I was into trying out new sites so I wanted to get beta invites. I’m not so interested anymore – I’m overloaded on sites to test and really don’t have the time.
5. Wordle – Generate Word Clouds from Text, RSS, and del.icio.us This online utility allows you to generate a word cloud based on bookmark tags, an RSS feed or input text, such as lyrics to a song.

There you go. My 5 crappiest articles or perhaps my 5 articles that left all potential commenters speechless.

photo credit: kevindooley

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

5 Unpopular (Anti) Social Articles

I really like delicious for saving my bookmarks and have about 4,000 sites bookmarked there. Recently I wrote about how to create a delicious bookmarks page – mine is limited to sites that I tag with WordPress.

I also use quite a few delicious rss feeds; on particular tags, my network, and on what’s popular.

The feed this week isn’t for a site but is rather the rss feed for what’s popular on delicious. When I’m looking for ideas or sites that haven’t heard of before, I go through this feed. Sites currently in my feed are a hot dog halloween costume for dogs (do people really dress their dogs up for Halloween?), 50 favorite words from the BBC (did you know that Mallemaroking is the carousing of seamen in icebound ships – that comes up a lot), and usernamecheck, which allows you to check the availability of your username on almost 70 sites.

I picked some silly ones to list here but there are a lot of fun, useful and bizarre links in the popular delicious rss feed.

RSS Feed: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/popular?count=15

photo credit: dramafreezone

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Stuff This in Your RSS – 10/14/08 – Popular Links on Delicious

Two weeks ago I wrote an article on how to exclude pages from appearing in your header or sidebar navigation bar. So, now that you’ve removed that page what do you do with it?

Vered, from MomGrind, wanted to remove her Legal page from the sidebar. She then added a link to the page in her footer.

I have a number of pages that aren’t in my header navigation. They are pages that I want to include on my site but aren’t important enough to warrant a prominent location. So, where are they? Most of them are on the sidebar under the headings “Bookmarks”, and “Lifestream”.

The list of links that starts at Bookmarks and ends with Tumblr are all links included in my Links or Blogroll section of WordPress. They are divided into segments because I have assigned categories to my Links. I know, I know – categories for links are different than categories for posts and using the same term for both is confusing.

Link categories are created under Manage > Link Categories and then categories can be assigned to your links (blogroll) under Manage > Links. You can also assign and create a new category when you are adding a new link.

So, back to the original topic.

How to Make a Bookmarks Page

1. Create a new page. Call it bookmarks and then publish the page.
2. Exclude the page from your navigation.
3. Go to Manage > Pages and select the page that you just created. Right below the page title is the permalink to the page that you can use anywhere on your site. Copy the permalink.
4. Go to Manage > Links > Add New
5. Create a link from the page permalink that you copied and then assign it to a new category called Bookmarks

Ok, so now that we have a blank page called Bookmarks listed in our blogroll or links under it’s own category, we need to login to our delicious account.

1. Go to Settings > Blogging > Link Rolls
2. Fill out the information and select the various options
3. Copy the script code at the top of the page
4. Paste the code into your new Bookmarks page

You can view my bookmarks page here. In the delicious options when I was creating the script, I selected 50 and limited to items that I tagged WordPress

So, now you have you own bookmarks page and you have my list of WordPress bookmarks. I bookmark more on that topic than anything else so, if you are also interested in plugins, themes, and code snippets, bookmark my page. Or better yet, add kwbridge to your delicious network.

Note: If delicious is experiencing problems, your bookmarks page will too.

photo credit: deadeyebart

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress – How To Create a Delicious Bookmarks Page

Zippy

Immediately noticeable is the site is fast! I wouldn’t care if they added a single feature or a new design as long as they kept the new speed. As much as I love delicious for storing, sharing, discovering and accessing bookmarks from anywhere, the speed has always been slooowwww.

Navigation

Navigation has been reorganized into three main sections; Bookmarks, People and Tags. Search has been enhanced and you can now search your bookmarks, a bundle, your networks bookmarks and more.

Tag Bar

The tag bar is a new feature that enables searching bookmarks by tags and tag combinations. And even nicer – it includes autocomplete!

Single Bookmark

It is now super easy to navigate to tags related to the bookmark directly from the bookmark. Each bookmark’s save count is also contained in a blue box. The darker the blue and the bigger the box visually shows how many people have bookmarked that page. Clicking on the blue save count box will give you the complete history of the bookmark and will show you in your network has also saved that page.

Sidebar

The sidebar still lists all of your tags but a feature that I really like is that your top 10 tags are moved to the top. This gives a quick way of telling if another user’s interests are similar to yours.

Finally

Overall, I really like the new design and features but it should have happened sooner. I wish all bookmark pages contained an image of the site like the popular page does and I wish there was more of a social community to the site, similar to diigo. Hopefully, this is only the first wave of improvements.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Delicious – Finally Tastier

Fav Thumbs, created by one of the developers of Swurl, Ryan Sit, provides a graphical representation of your del.icio.us bookmarks. The idea behind this is that for many of us a picture jogs our memory more than a line of text does. It is also really pretty.

Today, logging in took quite some time. I’m not sure if it’s a the service or if it is because I have so many bookmarks. I don’t remember, however, the login taking so long the first time I looked at this site.

Bookmarks can be viewed in a grid or the carousel format. The size of each image can also be resized with the control bar on the top right. You can get a lot of bookmarks on each page by making each image small. On the top left is a button called Sync. I clicked this and waited for the sync process but I’m not quite sure what it does and didn’t see an about or faq that explained it. On the right is your list of tags just like in del.icio.us, so your bookmarks can be viewed by tag. This is very useful because FavThumbs doesn’t currently have a search function. Finally, on the left is a pullout feedback link. This is a great place to submit feature requests.

I don’t think I would want to view my bookmarks like this all of the time because the loading is slow. It is, however, very useful for a visual view of your bookmarks when you are unable to locate an item via tags. For example, I was thinking about a particular site earlier today but couldn’t remember what it was called but did know it was about video games. When I logged into Fav Thumbs to get a screenshot, I selected the games tag and saw the site I had been thinking about in the top row.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Fav Thumbs – Visualize Your Delicious Bookmarks

The word clouds can not be saved to your computer but can be saved to the online gallery, printed or you can take a screenshot of your word cloud.

The word clouds can be customized by font, layout and color. The results are really quite beautiful

The following are screenshots I took of word clouds that I created over the weekend.

Text Option: Lyrics to Marianne by Tori Amos

RSS Option: RSS Feed of this Site

del.icio.us option: tags from my del.icio.us account kwbridge

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Wordle – Generate Word Clouds from Text, RSS, and del.icio.us