The Spinning Donut

Here are 25 Terrific Tweets during the past week from the folks I follow on Twitter.  There’s gold in them there tweets!!  

1. – The 30 Day Challenge continues and I have to list it again amongst the terrific tweets because there’s so much great information available, from looking for a niche for a blog topic to doing market research in that niche to creating a blog to populating that blog with content and creating links to that blog as well as reviewing the statistics of the blog’s traffic.

If you’re a noob to advanced web publisher, there’s something for everyone.  It might take a bit of time and you might fall behind like I have, but nevertheless – great info.  Oh yea, for FREE!!   Thanks Ed Dale and gang!!

2. – Tell-a-Friend - Kind of like addThis to promote your pages on your blog or websites.

3. – Another tool for the web designer – jQuery Grid – awesome examples page and code included to provide a grid feature on your blog or website.

4. – Yahoo launched fire eagle

“Fire Eagle is a service that helps users share their location online with their friends and with other sites and services.”  Find out more…

5. – Building with WordPress: From sketch to prototype to company website in 5 hours by Max

6. – A Quick Tutorial on JavaScript Bookmarklets by Matt Cutts

7. – twitterfeed – Automatically post the feed of the Alltop news blog to your Twitter account appearing as a tweet from you.  Also, new at Alltop – Tech News, Open Source, Content Management.

8. – Where can I see my friends’ listening activity on Pandora? by Get Satisfaction

9. – Test your web site to see if it’s ready for mobile customers! by dotMobi

10. – Exporting Everything Out of Google Docs by The Paisano.  Talking about Greasemonkey scripts.  Go here to download Greasemonkey.

“Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

Hundreds of scripts are already available for free. And if you’re the tinkerer sort, you can also write your own.“

Here’s another script that allows you to follow a bunch of folks on twitter easily - Twitter Smarter with Greasemonkey by Promote My Site.  Pretty freaky.

11. – Design for Emotion and Flow by boxesandarrows

12. – Interview With Peter Kent, Author of Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Wordtracker

13. – StumbleUpon removes the 200 friends limit.  Woo Hoo!!  Talking about StumbleUpon, don’t forget about Caroline Middlebrook’s StumbleRush course.  I’m also in the middle of that as well.

14. – Twitter’s 2000-Follow Limit Raises A Ruckus. But How Many People Can You Seriously Watch Anyway? by TechCrunch

15. – Kaltura Launches WordPress Plugin for Interactive Video by Mashable

16. – drag and drop.io by drop.io – Pretty darn cool.

17. – Writing Code in Your Posts by Codex

18. – 25+ Tools For Accounting and Budgeting by Mashable – Maybe you won’t use any of these but from a design/functionality perspective you might learn or get some good design ideas.

19. – Create your own home page with Alefo

20. – Entertaining - flickrvision

21. – FaceYourManga.com

22. – 30+ Great Web Tools You Might not Know Yet but Should by SEOptimise

23. – Backup your twitter followers, friends, favorites, and your own tweets with Tweetake

24. – Talk amongst yourselves – Utterz – Mobile Multimedia Discussions

25. – 17 Websites to Boost Your Designer Profile by FreelanceSwitch

photo credit: foshie

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This is a continuation of my weekly Terrific Tweets from Twitter - 22 Terrific Tweets and 23 Terrific Tweets lists.  Here are 24 Terrific Tweets from just an inkling of the Twitter community.  There’s gold in them there tweets.

1. – The first week of Ed Dale’s The 30 Day Challenge has been completed and there continues to be a bunch of great stuff to learn.  I’m way behind and if you are too or you’re just liking to get started you can catch up at The 30 Day Challenge.

So far in the course we’ve learned how to identify 2-3 niche markets that we’re interested in and do some market keyword research using a tool called Market Samurai which is very cool and addictive once you start using it.

You need to watch the vids on how to use it and apply your keywords to help find what kind of online stats are happening with those keywords.  That’s just a tidbit of The 30 Day Challenge, there’s quite a bit to check out.

2. – On the fun side of things check out Wordle.  Here’s the FAQ that also helps you understand what folks are doing with Wordle.

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

3. – Email marketing series at Chris Garrett’s blog - Email Marketing Tips: What is Email Marketing?, Email Marketing Tips: List Building, Email Marketing Tips: Getting More Email Subscribers, Email Marketing Tips: Email Tracking, and Email Marketing Tips: Email Testing.

4. – 23 Beautiful Examples of Web Site Archives by SitePoint

5. – Lighthouse - beautifully simple issue tracking

“Whether you’re an army of one or a team of 50, Lighthouse’s simple interface let’s you get down to business on your projects.”

When I test out new issue tracking software I sometimes use my family members as projects with issues.  

6. – PSD2HTML - Send them your PSD and they’ll turn it into HTML and more.

7. – Free Market Research Government Research for Business by AllBusiness

8. – The Secrets of Facebook Marketing by Jim Kukral with Shama Hyder - Top 10 Ways to Use Facebook to Promote your Business for Free by Shama Hyder

9. – 15 Abilities You Must Have to Get Out of the Rat Race by Sparkplug CEO

10. – More fun with Twitter - Twitter StreamGraphs

11. – Cascading Style Sheets by Web Design Group

12. – Don’t feel alone if your Twitter account gets deleted by GetSatisfaction

13. – Keep Track of Your Favorite Blogs in Gmail by ReadWriteWeb

14. – Gmail Tip: How To Browse Only the Unread Messages by DailyBlogTips

15. – Real Time, Live Twitter Monitor by Monitter

16. – ToAnswer - Get your questions answered in 140 characters or less

“About anything at all? ToAnswer is a Twitter-based mini-application that will help you get your questions answered quickly.”

17. – New book coming out - Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know at Amazon

18. – 15 Blogs All Bloggers Should Read by Ultimate Blogging Experiment

19. – How To Use EzineArticles And Not Get Penalized For Duplicate Content? by Gary Conn

20. – Make WordPress Search Function Suck Less by Yoast

21. – I love this website.  The videos and all of it, especially the design!!  CSS Tricks

22. – youare.com

“YouAre is a free social networking site to share in real time what you are doing, your interests and your professional profile with friends, colleagues — and anyone you want to connect with. A faster way to show your true self.”

23. – feedly - A more social and magazine-like start page

24. – Socialthing!

“See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!

Socialthing! makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.

It’s a place to see “what’s up” in your digital life, and figure out where to go to from there…“

photo credit: Paul Davidson

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Although I think of Digsby as an Instant Messaging client, it does much more.  For folks who use Instant Messaging, Digsby also offers quite a few extra features.  In this day of social networking Digsby allows you to add the following social networking sites:

• FaceBook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• with more to come

As well as IM (Instant Messaging) of course:

• AIM
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Google Talk
• ICQ
• Jabber
• Facebook Chat

Digsby also does email.  You can add the following email services:

• Gmail
• Yahoo Mail
• AOL/AIM Mail
• IMAP
• POP

You can minimize digsby so it sits in your Taskbar in Windows or open in a Buddy List window.  To set everything up, you add accounts to the Preferences area which is very customizable.

With an Outlook sidebar metaphor as your Buddy List, you hover your mouse over the various services and you’ll see your messages for each service allowing you to click on certain tasks for that message.  Depending on what services you have accounts setup for will determine the various actions you can take per message.

So for example, if you have an email in Gmail and you’re viewing the message using Digsby you’ll be able to open it, mark as read, archive it, delete it, or report it as spam just like you would if you were actually in Gmail.

Digsby is a great solution for folks who like to use Instant Messaging as well as getting connected to a few of the bigger, more popular social networking sites.  When you receive messages from the various services there are good sized pop-up windows that display your messages at the bottom of your screen.

I like the look and feel of it and my younger sister who is not a techy-type person but someone who spent a ton of time using instant messaging is using it and is able to work with her social networking sites as well.

Digsby writes on their web site that they’ll be adding services and I’m sure as they get added Digsby will become more and more popular as an instant messaging, email and social networking message aggregator.

See more at there web site including screen shots, features, and of course their blog.

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Below you will find the most popular articles of the past month. Check them out if you missed any.

• Social Networks Will Make You Cool - Another context you can benefit from using the social networking sites is building traffic to your blog, promoting your blog posts and gaining subscribers.
• How To Create StumbleUpon Content - For those of you that have never heard of StumbleUpon, it’s a website that allows you to randomly “Stumble Upon” websites.
• Creating in Firefox - The title of this blog post could certainly be Working in Firefox. However, Creating fits much better since that’s what we want to feel like when we’re “working” and it has a more positive connotation than Working does for some people.
• 22 Terrific Tweets - In my previous post 21 Terrific Tweets, I noted how you can find some good stuff in twitter. This time, here are 22 terrific twitter tweets. I’m tellin’ ya’ - There’s gold in them there tweets.
• WordPress Tags Explained - If you’ve been wondering about WordPress tags and how to use them, then browse over to Ninja Blog Setup where Jon Symons has a free ebook on What Every Blogger Ought to Know About Tags.

photo credit: tristrambrelstaff

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Continuing on with the gold you can find in them there Twitter Tweets, like my previous articles 21 Terrific Tweets and 22 Terrific Tweets hare are 23 more nuggets for you:

1. - del.icio.us is now delicious.com.  We can all stop suffering from typing del.icio.us.  Although clever, it wasn’t fun to type if you didn’t have the site bookmarked.  More importantly they’ve redesigned their site and wrote about the details which include speed, search and design.  And this is a good time to grab the Firefox Delicious Bookmarks add-on. To make it easy for you to share those bookmarks.  Check the delicious tools page for more tools.

2. - Ed Dale started his freely available 30 Day Challenge course – The first lesson started this week.  Some of the good stuff you’ll be doing and learning how to do include finding 5-10 niches to create an online business in.  There are rock solid videos and tasks to get you going in this first lesson.  Highly recommended for beginners and for those of us who need a good swift kick.

3. - Drop.io works with Twitter now - tweet.io.  What does that mean to you?  Well, you can upload a file to drop.io and your twitter will be tweeted.

4. - Ok, this wasn’t so much a tweet but a reminder to check out The Beginner’s Guide to Zen Habits – A Guided Tour.  For folks just starting a blog or need a reminder of some great content and how to write it, this list contains quite a few examples.  Like I’ve suggested before, try to take one of the lists and place content in it that reflects your niche.  This is one way of practicing list-type blog posts.

5. - Ok, this too wasn’t so much a tweet but a reminder to check out How to Write Magnetic Headlines.  Again, for folks just starting a blog or need a reminder of some great content and how to write it, this list contains quite a few examples.  Again, try to place content that reflects your niche in the articles.

6. - Continuing on the blogging side of things, Chris Garrett reminds us of his Killer Flagship Content ebook which is also a great read and re-read along with his latest article Using Flagship Content to Make Sales.

7. - And continuing on again with the blogging tips.  Don’t forget to use HitTail to track your blog and some of The Long Tail suggestions you can use to write for your blog or extend existing blog posts.  Let me know if you need help doing this in the comments.

8. - If you have a tumblr account and link it to your twitter account you’ll have an automagic archiving solution for your tweets.  Sweet!!  

9. - Some very excellent premium WordPress Themes by WooThemes that will make your blog look professional.  I know, I know, you’re asking, “When are you buying one and changing your theme Bill?”  Let me tell you, I’m keepin’ my eye out on the Fresh News Theme with color schemes #1 or #2.  Pretty hot lookin’.  Snap!!

10. - A bit techie but I like this kind of stuff - Inside The Linux Boot Process by IBM

11. - This looks like a good conference to attend and it’s free - the Midwest Unconference in Chicago, Illinois, on October 17-18, 2008.

12. - Social Media Thought Leader Chris Brogan interviewed by Jim Canterucci.

13. - How to Install KDE 4.1 on Ubuntu 8.04 by Marius Nester at Softpedia

14. - Put Twitter in your Firefox sidebar with this add-on - TwitKit

15. - Microsoft offers Overview Series: Windows Vista Performance and Tuning -  Improve Performance Quickly and easily.

16. - Darren Rowse on Monetization, Community, and ProBlogging at Performancing.com

17. - I’ve had trouble with PNGs in IE6 and I found this by accident or a tweet that is - Fix PNGs in IE6 by Unit Interactive

18. - Considering using WordPress for a CMS?  CMS stands for Content Management System.  Check this article out by Devlounge – Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS.  Don’t forget about the gold in the comments.  They’re just as good as the article.

19. - Questioning Bookmarking at mathewingram.com – Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

20. - Firebug is a great add-on for Firefox but what if you need it for Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari?  Firebug Lite.

21. - The Most Powerful Female Bloggers on FriendFeed by Profy.com

22. - A Twitter Brand Index by Fluent Simplicity

23. - Keep It Simple Stupid; 48 Super Simple, Clean Websites by Inspiredology

photo credit: Ella’s Dad

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In my previous post 21 Terrific Tweets, I noted how you can find some good stuff in twitter. This time, here are 22 terrific twitter tweets. I’m tellin’ ya’ - There’s gold in them there tweets.

1. - Do you want to test iPhone apps or see what the iPhone has to offer? Here’s an easy way. Browse over to TestiPhone.com - iPhone Simulator

2. - Need to email, send messages via SMS and other Social Networks on a timed basis? You might want to take a look at sendible.

3. - Need to setup a customer list using AWeber - Checkout the experience shared at AWeber - 6 Painful Lesson Learned.

4. - Are you a small business who’s trying to make heads and tales of all this social media stuff? Check out The Hierarchy of Social Marketing by Duct Tape Marketing for some guidance.

5. - Blogging - Well, it’s not out yet but I believe Darren Rowse at Problogger is working on an article that talks about dates on blog posts. I’m assuming there will be some good discussion on old blog posts and when to take the dates off so when readers find your old posts, they don’t browse away from it because they automatically think it’s old information.

6. - Is Firefox crashing for you? Read Safe Mode at the Firefox Knowledge Base.

7. - How to Earn Your First Love Dollar by Steve Pavlina

8. - Catorgerized List of Social Media Sites by Traffikd (a continually updated page)

9. - WordPress users - Reader Question: Is WordPress Safe To Use? by Performancing

10. - Copyblogger leaves quotes on Twitter and this latest one is a good one - “a hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” ~Frank Capra

11. - Productivity on steroids - The List to Beat All Lists: Top 20 Productivity Lists to Rock Your Tasks by ZenHabits

12. - Resources For Web Design

13. - And another Twitter Client - Twitch

14. - SEO discussions with Rae Hoffman, aka Sugarrae and Michael Gray, aka Graywolf started a live stream over at Ustream.tv. Sounds like they’ll be continuing the show.

15. - Get Started With JSON as well as Ruby on Rails for Beginners by Webmonkey

16. - Make and Share a Timeline with dipity

17. - Outlook vs. Gmail - The Definitive Comparison by Lifehacker

18. - From Mark Cuban’s blog - A Couple of My Rules for Startups

19. - Favtape.com - Create & share an instant mixtape of your Pandora bookmarked songs or Last.fm loved tracks.  Um, this one seems hot to me.  If you use Pandora or Last.fm to listen to music, start bookmarking your songs you listen to.  With Favtape.com you can listen to your bookmarked songs forward and backward.  For example, you can’t just keep skipping forward in Pandora, you have to listed to some of the music you select.  You also can’t rewind.  Well, Favtape.com pretty much let’s you do whatever you want with your bookmarked music list.  Nice!!  

20. - Blog Pimping or: Who Do You Want to Delight? by 43 Folders

21. - 45 Excellent Free Web Templates listed at DzineBlog

22. - The Friendfeedization Of Facebook by TechCrunch

I’d be interested in hearing about your links

What links have helped you in the last 24 hours from Twitter?

One final note - I created this blog post in Google Docs and I will probably not do that again.  I hate the HTML that was generated as well as missing all the bolds on the numbers.  All the HTML ended up all packed together.  The permalink was originally 712 instead of 22-terrific-tweets, I know that’s probably not Google Docs job.

I wanted to experiment posting this way but might have to reconsider.  Also, on the initial publish of the post from Google Docs it did not send the title of the article, the title was empty.  So I’ll go back and check out some of the options in Google Docs to see if I missed anything.

photo credit: kevindooley

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