Twitter Archives - Page 5 of 16

Useful links: Motion, Environments for Humans, Style Tweets, HTML5 Semantics

Motion 2011: motion is known for bringing together the brightest and most creative minds in the motion graphics, visual effects {VFX}, and animation industries. This year is no exception.

Environments for Humans has some great conferences scheduled. You get top experts and you don’t have to leave home to attend.

Style Twitter posts on your site with CSS3. Nice tutorial at .net magazine.

Understanding HTML5 Semantics is at Adobe Dev. Helpful connection linking sectioning elements to the document outline. For example,

Remember, when an element is being used simply for styling purposes or as a convenience for scripting, a div should still be used. The section element is not that generic. It is defining a portion of your page that should create a new section of the outline of the page.

How To Automatically Create A WordPress Post from Your Tweets

We’re in a time where Twitter and Facebook have taken over the world. It’s pretty safe to say that almost every active Internet user has an account on one or the other or even both. Not a day goes by where I don’t see Twitter mentioned on a TV show (especially reality shows) or a commercial.

Twitter is the new way to find out what’s going on in the world and many people even use it much like a blog. They share interesting links that they’ve found, post inspiring quotes, talk about TV shows, give their opinions about breaking news and celebrity scandals, and much more. With all of this posting, why not create blog posts from your tweets and share with your readers? It only make sense since that’s where the real content is being posted.

Well that’s why the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools was created. It not only allows you to display in the sidebar of your blog and automatically post new blog posts to Twitter, but it also lets you create a blog post from your tweets. Let’s take a look at how this works.

Getting Started

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll need to update the Twitter Tools settings in your blog dashboard. The first step here is registering your blog as a Twitter app. This is done by filling out a fairly simple registration form.

After completing your registration, you’ll need to copy and paste 4 things into the Twitter Tools settings: consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret. Finally, click on “Connect to Twitter” button in WordPress.

If all goes well, you should be taken to a new set of options with the message, “Yay! We connected with Twitter” at the top of the page.

Create Individual Posts

This next page of settings that you see is where set up WordPress to create a new blog post for each of your tweets. You’ll want to skip down to where it says, “create a blog post from each of your tweets” and select “yes.”

Next you’ll need to enter the category for your blog posts. If you don’t already have a category that you want to use, you can create one and then come back and select it from the drop down menu.

Next you can enter tags to be automatically attached to each of your blog posts. If you have multiple authors on your blog, you can select the author’s name that you want attached to each of the blog posts. Lastly, you can choose whether or not to include @replies. It’s probably a good idea to leave this to “no” since @replies are more personal and less important.

You can see an actual blog post below. This will of course look different depending on your theme, but you get the general idea.

Create a Digest

In addition to creating a new blog post from each of your tweets, you can also choose to create a daily or weekly digest for your tweets. So instead of having an individual blog post for each of your tweets, this will put all of your tweets for the day or week into a single post.

If you tweet a lot, this is definitely your best option. It will create less posts on your blog (and RSS feed) and I’m sure your subscribers would much rather read 1 post a day or week dedicated to your tweets, rather than 20+ a day to 100+ a week.

Lastly, you can setup a title for your digest and choose the order of your tweets.

Additional Options

The Twitter Tools WordPress plugin also comes with 3 other plugins: bit.ly URLs, exclude category, and hashtags. These are all deactivated by default. These can be used to enhance Twitter Tools and are mainly for those who are creating tweets from blog posts. So if you decide to automatically post new blog posts to Twitter with Twitter Tools, be sure to check out these additional options as well.

This guest post was kindly sent and written by Lior Levin who is an advisor to a psd to css company that does psd conversions. Lior also works with the main security faculty in Tel Aviv University.

Useful Links: Google Fonts, Scientific wow, Teach with Twitter, Rap

Google Web Fonts, V2. Now out. I tried out one the of fantasy fonts called Swanky on vdebolt.com.

Scientific American has 60 new blogs under its umbrella.

28 Creative Ways Teachers are Using Twitter. Some of them are indeed creative.

Hat tip to Spydergrrl for finding this climate change rap.

Useful links: Facebook app, Mac malware, iOS 5 rumors, Wells Fargo settlement

Turn your Facebook profile into a virtual museum. Might be a good way to take a look at what you’re sharing and whether it’s really what you want to be sharing.

Mac OS update against Mac Defender.

Twitter Getting Photos in Order Ahead of iOS 5 Integration. Just a few days until Apple announces what’s up with iOS 5, and these rumors are among the most interesting I’ve seen.

Wells Fargo will pay $16 Million to users who experienced accessibility issues with their phone and website services.

Useful links: Twitter for .edu, public learning

Is Your School Missing Opportunities to Leverage Twitter? Examples and links to a white paper that describes what top schools are doing.

What is the scaffolding for learning in public? contains a ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’ for public learning and wealth of resource links.

Pew Report: Search Still Drives News Traffic But Sharing is Important. Are you using Twitter links and Facebook Likes to direct your attention more than ever these days?

Yahoo research on Twitter: Who’s Talking, Who’s Listening?

Yahoo! Research just published a lengthy study about Who Says What to Whom on Twitter. They used Twitter Lists to find what they called elite users, and based their conclusions on that data set.

The results of the research are available in a hard-to-read PDF file with some interesting charts and graphs. Here’s the summary information. I’ve added some paragraph breaks to make it easier to read.

First, we find that although audience attention has indeed fragmented among a wider pool of content producers than classical models of mass media, attention remains highly concentrated, where roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all attention. Within the population of elite users, moreover, attention is highly homophilous, with celebrities following celebrities, media following media, and bloggers following bloggers.

Second, we find considerable support for the two-step flow of information — almost half the information that originates from the media passes to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classified as ordinary users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers.

Third, we find that although all categories devote a roughly similar fraction of their attention to different categories of news (World, U.S., Business, etc), there are some differences — organizations, for example, devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.

We also find that different types of content exhibit very different lifespans. In particular, media-originated URLs are disproportionately represented among short-lived URLs while those originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs.

Finally, we nd that the longest-lived URLs are dominated by content such as videos and music, which are continually being rediscovered by Twitter users and appear to persist indefinitely.

I thought the statement that long-lived URLs were those originated by bloggers was significant. Bloggers are indeed becoming an important force in the media landscape. Who are the top 5 bloggers they studied? Mashable, ProBlogger, Kibe Loco and Nao Salvo (both Brazilian blogs) and dooce.

Another of the statements — that attention is highly ‘homophilous’ (a word my dictionary does not contain, but I presume they intend to mean an interest in people who are similar to us) — just makes common sense. Of course Twitter users follow people who share their interests. With all the noise on Twitter, you have to narrow it down somehow. Is it surprising that I’d be more interested in what Zeldman is talking about than in what Justin Bieber is talking about?

Useful links: Interactions, Mary Sue, Steampunk, Biz Stone

Visualizing First-Time Interactions at SXSW from Pleasure and Pain is another of those charts of hubs, connections, and connectors that is so fascinating. This time it uses contacts made via Hashable.

The Mary Sue is a new blog devoted to female geek culture. I’ve been watching them a couple of weeks and have seen several very worthy posts there, such as this one: The Unseen Effects of Affirmative Action at MIT.

Does the word steampunk make you happy? Well, GeekMom is celebrating a whole week of Steampunk posts, beginning with this one.

Twitter just turned 5. (See my post about Twitter turning 5 on BlogHer.) The NPR program Fresh Air interviewed Biz Stone about Twitter in preparation for the anniversary. It’s a great interview and must listening. Twitter’s Biz Stone on Starting a Revolution.