LiveBlogging typically means you’re using your blog with some of these strategies (or some kickbutt app like this). It means you’re using your blog.
But now, with this really cool WordPress plugin, you can use Twitter as your primary source of updating right on your very own blog.
Now, that’s pretty cool.
I think I’ll be using this during my next conference. What about you?
I literally stumbled upon this service provided by Answer.com yesterday and I was floored at how easily it could be implemented and used.
AnswerTips from Answer.com is a very simple service that allows your readers to simply double-click on any word on the site to pull up an in-browser modal window to help define or explain the word. Just go ahead and try it here on ChurchCrunch.com!
In less than 3 minutes I had it fully working, installing it on my footer. They even have a WordPress Plugin to do the trick if you want to rock it that way.
I’ve been trying to find a reason why one shouldn’t have this service installed on their blog or website and I can come up with a few but perhaps I just haven’t used it long enough. It is really quite useful.
What would be cool is if one could create their own version of this particular service for their own Blog or Ministry/Church website so that it could pull in data results from a pre-determined data set, or just keep the results limited to the entire domain and/or your church online properties.
What do you think?
Short and sweet post for the first one out the gate this rainy Saturday morning (at least in Atlanta, Georgia):
Best web utility that I’ve found so far in the month of March is the HTML to PDF Converter. It does exactly what it claims to do, it’s fast, and so far in all of my tests has been superb (there are a thousand and one ways to mess this type of conversion up).
Take a look at what I did this morning or just go ahead and try it yourself.
What would be awesome is if they could get an API running and actually be able to do this on the fly, from anywhere, with a shortcut in your toolbar or even widgets on a page… or, what about a WordPress Plugin that’ll automatically convert a blog post and then print?
That would be most excellent.
You might remember how I wrote about how Facebook Connect Closes Doors and how I am, personally, against the use of it at this point, but I know that many of you don’t share that perspective.
And that’s great! We need diversity. It fuels the most innovative uses of technology.
For those that are going to go ahead and dive in and use Facebook Connect with your WordPress blog, CMS, or site, you should probably take a look at the WordPress Plugin that’s available:
I’ve tried it on a test server and it appears to be working properly.
Let me know if you intend to use it and show us your implementation!
There’s really not much to say about this “Tweet-This” WordPress Plugin other than this: I’ve decided to use it because it just works really really really well.
And so far, it plays extremely nicely with some of my design tests.
Tweetmeme.com is a service that serves up the hottest “Twitter-memes” on Twitter right now. But as an added service they’ve enabled content creators and bloggers to include a small javascript so that owners can “Tweet-Out” their stuff.
Check out their Button Page for more info. They went a step further and created a super lightweight WordPress Plugin that I’m sporting on this blog right now. It’s about a thousand times lighter than the previous plugin that I was using.
My favorite thing about it? It actually counts the number of tweets that have been made about the actual entry. That’s a good number to know from an analytics/metrics perspective.
Finally, the only caveat really is just being “aware” of where you place it on your blog post. Obviously some of my previous entries “hide” the button due to large images on the first line of content. I’ll just drop those images down from now on and start off with some copy.
Not too bad of a sacrifice for smoothe-Tweet-This performancing.
Give it a go. Let me know if you use it!
Let’s start at the beginning: What exactly is a Sitemap?
Here’s what Sitemaps.org says:
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.
In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites.
Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.
Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
So, sounds good, right? For the most part, yes. But take careful note of the bottom few paragraphs which tells us more than what we probably understood first pass around:
There is so much great stuff out there in regards to plugins for WordPress. As I’ve already mentioned before, “if you can dream it WP can build it.”
I really mean that. I’ve seen WordPress do things that would make your heart stop. And then on top of that, it’s free…! God is good.
Here are 5 Plugins that have crossed my virtual desk in the last week or so that are just dope:
Any plugins for WordPress that have you “fired up” lately? Share ‘em!
If you’re using WordPress as a CMS for your church or organization website (which is a good idea if you’re not), here’s a keeper: The MailTo: Staff Plugin.
Essentially, if you need to email your staff and/or volunteers, or anyone who has a registered username in the system, according to their “role” in the system, you can do that easily now with this very intuitive plugin.
Or, if you just have a number of users in your system and want to send them emails, this will do the trick as well.
I used it for the DriveInternational.org website to email out updates and information for all the registered users who were planning on attending the conference (over 1,000+ registrations).
It works. Period. Simple. Have fun.
Tell me if you use it!
Just kidding.
But they certainly can make you feel special.
TweetBacks is a new and super simple way of tracking how many times your blog posts are getting “tweeted” on Twitter.
Just take a look at my first test on the previous post here! Scroll to the bottom.
How easy is it to implement? SUPER EASY.
Just copy and paste this code right after or before your comment code in your single post file on your WordPress template. I would suggest after.
<script src=”http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?stats=true”></script>
Or, you could just download the WordPress Plugin here.
Check this out folks. This plugin for WordPress, called Sermon Browser, just might covert a few of you to moving to WP fulltime.
That’s a good thing. Screeny after the jump.
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