I have been building websites for some friends and clients since I learned how easy it is to set up Wordpress sites. It is amazing how many applications are available as plug-ins and widgets and its all free. You can add practically anything you need to your site as a plug-in. So when a client asked me if it would be possible to display multiple twitter service accounts to his site I said, “of course we can”. Well, I soon learned that I had violated the assumption rule.

First, I will tell you about the application because I think its pretty cool. The site is for one of the largest concrete pouring companies in Atlanta. Their crews are on multiple sites on a daily basis and they want to have each crew leader submit tweets throughout the day from their phone with pictures and info about what they are doing. That way anyone visiting their website can follow the activities of the day – real time. Each crew leader has his own twitter account so there will be multiple tweets from multiple users coming into the website. I think this is an amazing application of social media to mainstream business. It has followers written all over with good solid information being posted. People will read the feeds on twitter and see them on the site and instantly know these people are experts at what they are doing. It also has that real world thing going on. People like that – they connect with that.

When I started to search for this application I thought it would be pretty easy to find since I knew there were plug-ins for bringing twitter feeds into your site. I found many different plug-ins for adding single account twitter feeds to your site but I could not find anything to accomplish what I was trying to do. After spending a couple of days looking for this particular application I finally found something that seemed promising. As I looked deeper into the listing I had found with my gazillionth Google search there seemed a glimmer of hope. I was a little skeptical after being led down many dead ends over the last couple of days. Unbelievably, after some investigation it still smelled good. It looked good – Hmmm – just maybe this would work. Amazing. After countless searches I was looking at a page of code that was saying it was going to do exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t a plug-in though, just a page of code. It had been written by a young man in Colorado named Ryan Barr.

Ryan had written a three part series of projects to bring twitter feeds into a site. Part one was about pulling a single twitter users last tweet into a site. Part two was about pulling multiple tweets from a single user into a site. And part three was dead on about what I was looking for. Thank God, the search was over. I was pretty amazed that it had taken me this long to find this application. There were some things I had found along the way that sounded like it was going to do what I needed but after further investigation they all just worked with one twitter account.

It took me a little bit of time to figure out how I was going to get Ryan’s code to work on my site. What I ended up doing was hard coding Ryan’s php code into the sidebar of the theme I was working with. It worked like a charm.

Here is the code Ryan wrote in his blog to make it happen. You can change the variables at the top to meet your needs. There is a description and an example below the code to detail how to change the variables. Ryan was very thorough and attentive to making sure his program was as user friendly as possible.

<?php

?>

If you notice, the upper half of the script contains a few variables (each with a description of what each one does) that will modify how your Twitter block is displayed. Here are the eight variables that can be changed: $usernames, $limit, $show, $prefix, $prefix_sub, $wedge, $suffix_sub, $suffix. Let’s go over what each one does:

• $usernames – Which username’s the script will pull tweets from, separated by spaces. (" ")
• $limit – How many tweets for the script to pull. (Twitter set the maximum to 100 tweets.)
• $show – Whether or not to display the user names with the tweets.
• $prefix – What’s to be displayed before the block of tweets.
• $prefix_sub – What’s to be displayed before each individual tweet.
• $wedge – What’s to be displayed after each user name. (If $show is set to 1.)
• $suffix_sub – What’s to be displayed after each individual tweet.
• $suffix – What’s to be displayed after the block of tweets.

$usernames = "ryanbarr codyfisher";
$limit = "5";
$show = 1;
$prefix = "<h1>Twitter Feed</h1><ul>";
$prefix_sub = "<li>";
$wedge = " says: ";
$suffix_sub = "</li>";
$suffix = "</ul><p><a href=\"#\">More from our Twitter feeds!</a></p>";

 I have twittered with Ryan about his work and he says he is working on a plug-in to be released shortly.  I think it will be a great application addition to the plug-in arsenal of Wordpress.  As twitter continues to grow in popularity and people activate multiple accounts there will certainly be more of these  application needs.  Thanks Ryan for providing this for us and I look forward to using your plug-in when it comes out.  If you want to Visit Ryan’s Blog he has some great stuff in addition to this gem. You can also Follow Ryan On Twitter.  I think he is someone to watch and learn from.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments about the application of this awesome tool please drop a note below. 

Happy Blogging.

My First Websites

I first started creating websites about 7 years ago. The first website I designed using Microsoft Front Page. It was for my small business so I just wanted to have a web presence, nothing fancy. I found the function of Front Page to be cumbersome and never really figured it out. I got the site to a point that I uploaded it onto the host and left it for about a year. Within that year I tried to create a few more sites but got frustrated with Front Page. It just never seemed to do exactly what I wanted it to do. Trying to figure out all the little buttons and toggles just became a big hassle.

My next attempt was after learning some HTML and CSS. I figured after my Front Page experience I just needed to get to the bottom of the code and figure it out. The next site went very well and turned out great. With my new found skills I realized how easy it was to create the page the way I wanted it to look. I created a cool landing page that was a gateway page to the site. The main page and the category pages and even added a photo section. It was pretty cool. The problem was anytime I thought about updating my site it was a bit of a burden. I would have to create this document and do all the linking and then get into the main page and add links to get to the page. It was time consuming and tedious.

Hello Wordpress – Who Are You?

When I was first introduced to wordpress, I knew nothing about it. I took an online class that taught you how to build an affiliate site using wordpress.  Little did I know it was going to revolutionize my online business, but also my offline business and open many doors that previously I did not know where even there.  After learning some of the behind the scenes menus and procedures that makes wordpress sizzle I was off and running. I could not believe how easy it was and how much you could do with it. Not only was it easy to use but there were countless themes all ready for you to load onto the site and you instantly had a website. I have timed it. I can now choose a name, register the name with my host, install wordpress on the site and upload a theme and my foundation plugins and have the site up a running in about 45 minutes. There is still some work to do after that but you can own the name and have a web presence in that amount of time. Unbelievable!!!  I have created a quick wordpress tutorial to help you get a wordpress site up and running.  It is a brief tutorial – if you have questions – post a comment and I will be glad to assist you.

Read the rest of this entry

Get Traffic to Your Site

If you’re trying to sell something from your website, the big question is, “how to get traffic to your site?”  One strategy is to use the long tail keyword phrase.  The reason for this is that you don’t have as many sites out there with the particular phrase that you have.  For example, there are 31,600,000 search results out there that have the keyword phrase “car repairs.”  However, there are only 253,000 search results that contain the long tail keyword phrase “how to install a steering column.”  Do you see where I’m going with this?

Eliminate Competition

The more specific you can be with your keyword phrases, the more competition you will eliminate from vying for that coveted first page.  Yes, you are limiting your audience by doing this, however, if you do have an article to write about and it can be that specific, you’re chances for a sale do increase because the people typing in long tail phrases know more specifically what they’re looking for.  By the way, this doesn’t mean that you can’t put the phrase “car repairs” in your article.

For a few more tips, here’s another site I’ve found with a few more good marketing tips.

So!  Hope that helps.

Jeff.