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With the help of plug-ins, you can extend the functionality of your Wordpress blog far beyond what's available to you when you add it to your server.
One of the best ways to get the most out of your blogs is through social plug-ins. These simple plug-ins can be added to your blog to help you connect socially with both your readers and their friends. They offer a fine way to build traffic to your site.
Go social with your blog
Add to Facebook If you want to make it easy for readers to syndicate your content to Facebook, Add to Facebook is the plug-in for you.
The plug-in provides a simple option at the bottom of each post, called "Share on Facebook." When the reader clicks on that link, they're immediately delivered to their Facebook page, showing a thumbnail of the image in your blog post, as well as the beginning of your post. If Facebook followers click on that link, they'll be delivered to your page. It's a neat utility. And it's a great way to share content through social channels.
Add to Facebook makes it easy for readers to syndicate your content.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Digg Digg Although its name might suggest that Digg Digg is a way to get readers to share your content with the popular social news site, it's much more than that.
Digg Digg allows you to add voting buttons to your blog. You can add a TweetMeme retweet button, a Yahoo Buzz button, and a "Submit to Reddit" option, along with your Digg button. The plug-in also allows you to decide where to place those buttons. You can choose the top, bottom, left, or right of your post.
Digg Digg is a great way to syndicate your content around the Web.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Track and update all your social networks under Zensify's single roof
"All your networks are belong to us." That could be the tagline for Zensify, a new iPhone app that lets you view, update, and share content from multiple social networks.
In other words, Zensify aims to take the place of standalone apps for the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr--or at least to save you the time of bopping from one to another just to read and post updates.
In addition to those three popular networks, Zensify can connect you with 12seconds, Delicious, Digg, Photobucket, and YouTube. (Support for more services is in the works, according to the developer.)
After you sign into your various accounts (a slow but one-time procedure), Zensify lists all your friends' updates in a single, scrolling timeline. It also presents a scrolling tag bar (this one along the top) so you can quickly filter the timeline based on current trends.
Then there's also the Tag Cloud view, which displays the aforementioned "trendy tags" in a word cloud. I've never been a fan, but it's definitely a neat way to sift through updates.
Zensify's Track tool lets you search all your networks, complete with modifiers for things like tags, usernames, and types of content. It also provides a handy batch of saved searches so you can quickly look for updates that have, say, photos or links, or that come from Flickr or Facebook.
Want to keep an update for future reference? Tap the star icon to mark it as a favorite. Want to post an update or photo to one or more of your own networks? Tap the Post icon. (Finally, an easy way to update Facebook and Twitter simultaneously!)
Unfortunately, while Zensify lets you share or reply to others' Twitter posts, there's no easy way to do likewise with Facebook entries. You can "tap through" to the friend's Facebook page using Zensify's integrated browser, but that's a slow and awkward process. The app really needs to add a low-level reply option.
Of course, it's technically called Zensify Preview, so a few rough edges are to be expected. As it stands, Zensify looks very promising, and I suspect avid social-networkers will like it a lot.
Don't want to deal with the DiggBar? Or what if you want other tools to help improve your Digg experience? We have you covered with these Firefox add-ons.
DiggBar Remover Start with the DiggBar Remover. It removes the DiggBar when you're browsing. Done? OK, move on to these other add-ons...
Digg Comment Spotlight Sifting through Digg comments can be a pain. But the Digg Comment Spotlight highlights comments on a Digg story that were dugg by other users. So, if you don't want to read comments that were buried or never dugg, the Digg Comment Spotlight will help you quickly find all those comments that others liked. It makes reading comments much easier.
Digg Firefox Extension The Digg Firefox Extension lets you know if the page you're on has been submitted to Digg. If not, you can submit it in just a few clicks. If it has, the extension displays the number of Diggs the story has, how many people have commented on it, and the story's description. My favorite feature is the popular story notification, which pops up whenever a new story hits the front page. Overall, the Digg Firefox Extension is designed well. It's a must-have for any Digg fanatic.
The Digg Sidebar gets in the way.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Digg Sidebar The Digg Sidebar gives you real-time updates of all Digg activity. It runs in the sidebar and updates automatically without requiring a refresh. It's useful for some who want constant updates about Digg, but I didn't like how much screen real estate it took up. And resizing it, while possible, reduces its usefulness, since it's harder to read stories. It's best suited to the Digg addict.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Digg has just released a new extension for Firefox 3 that integrates whatever page you're on with the popular social news site. Included are handy things like a real-time pop-up window that notifies you when friends have dugg something, or when new stories hit the front pages of various sections. There's also a toolbar that can be toggled on the top of your browser which shows you if a page you're on has been submitted to Digg along with options to submit it yourself or read the user comments.
The extension only works in Firefox 3 but joins a previously existing offering that displays most of the same information from a drop down command menu. The newer version has a much more svelte look that can be toggled to exist off-screen with a click of a button.
One thing that's missing, and something I hope gets added in a future version is a way to get real-time notifications when certain stories hit the upcoming section. As I've ranted about before, the upcoming section is harder to parse than it used to be, even with the inclusion of the recommendation engine. Being able to pick out stories you want to hear about based on what site they're coming from, or with certain keywords would make it an extension worth keeping installed.
Digg's creator Kevin Rose has put together a quick screencast of the toolbar in action, which I've embedded below.
Digg Firefox 3 Extension from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.
Social-networking savant Flock has announced a re-branded version of its browser aimed at fashionistas. At the very least, it's aimed at people who like the color pink and lipstick marks on their advertising. Called Gloss, it's a pink-and-purple themed edition of Flock 1.2 that comes with fashion-related feeds and bookmarks pre-loaded.
The Gloss rebuild of Flock shows the pinker side of browsing.
(Credit: Flock, Inc.)The list of baked-in feeds for the Windows-only Gloss includes Cosmopolitan, TMZ, Glam.com, PopSugar, and These Boots Are Made for Stalking.
Gloss is getting pimped as a "fun" version of Flock, although I could've sworn that Flock received the same PR campaign comparing it to Firefox. Either way, it's hard to argue with a browser that promotes itself as a place where, "Your friends are always there--just like celebrities in rehab." It's hard to argue, of course, because sometimes it's better to just walk away. Slowly. Beyond having the topical feeds included and the new color scheme, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to get Gloss.
Flock itself has also received a couple of upgrades. The Flock 2 beta (download for Windows and Mac) goes up another point, incorporating the Firefox 3.0.1 security patch along with other bug-fixes. The Flock people are promising a lengthy beta cycle, so expect there to be at least one more update.
The official version of Flock (download for Windows and Mac) also gets a bump up, addressing bugs and security holes fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.16. Again, no major roadwork going on here, but it's definitely a good idea to upgrade to ensure that old exploits don't cause you grief.
The latest Flock update for Windows and Mac introduces more services to its ever-growing list of options, as well as a battery of performance and stability enhancements.
Most notably, Pownce and Digg have been integrated as people services. If you're not familiar with the self-styled "social browser," this means that you can perform all Digg- and Pownce-related chores--sorry, that should be "tasks"--from within the browser's social-networking features. Support for AOL Webmail has also been added, letting you check that account as easily as your Gmail account.
There's still a long list of known bugs that Flock has documented as in need of a fix.
Since Flock is a fork of the Firefox code that's been around for about a year, it will be interesting to see if future Flock updates attempt to integrate any Firefox 3 improvements or if they're going to pick their own migration pattern.
When Digg first came out with its labs section, almost immediately people threw together unofficial screensavers for each of the visualizations. Since the visualizations run in Adobe Flash, the user creations often just loaded up the pages in a full-screen Flash viewer. Today, Digg has launched official versions of the screensavers for all four of their labs visualizations, which were originally put together by Stamen Design.
Just like the Web versions, you can sit back and watch the current activity on Digg as it's happening, and interact with any of the content. The screensavers are cross platform, and run on Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4. You'll also need the latest version of Adobe Flash. There's still no Linux version (an outspoken quotient of Digg.com users), or support for users with dual monitors, meaning the <1 percent of Digg users are left in the cold.
An unfortunate side effect of having your blog or Web site hit by sudden, massive traffic of the type you get when linked to on sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit, is downtime. While bad for the person who owns the site, it's also the pits for people who want to get at the content and can't. There are services such as Duggmirror, and Google's cache to bail you out, but otherwise you're out of luck. Mr. Uptime is a new Firefox extension from the folks at Pingdom that lets you earmark downed sites, and return to them later when things are back to normal.
If you run into a downed site, just add it to the watch list and Mr. Uptime will let you know when it's back up.
(Credit: Pingdom.com)Once installed, if you hit a site that's down, the Mr. Uptime toolbar will automatically pop up. You can hit one button to bookmark it for later. Pingdom will keep an eye on the link until it's back up--or as long as you set it to look--then open it in a new tab or window on your browser. You can also set it to give you a small alert.
This is a great tool if you're a frequent user of social-bookmarking services and run into these dead links on a daily basis. It's also helpful if you're waiting on a more critical service such as a banking or commerce site. Otherwise, you're probably better off exercising patience.
(Credit:
Adobe Systems)
Adobe released the public beta of its Adobe AIR runtime environment (previously codenamed Apollo) about a month ago. The software is designed to allow the development of rich Internet applications that work on any operating system. I'm sure that there are technical differences, but it seems a lot like an amped-up widget engine to me.
Needless to say, AIR apps aren't nearly as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash apps (yet), but there have been a few interesting recent developments. The most-polished AIR application so far is Adobe Digital Editions, software for reading, downloading, and managing e-books. To learn more about it, check Seth Rosenblatt's First Look video for Adobe Digital Editions.
While Adobe Digital Editions might be the most powerful AIR app so far, the one with the most buzz is definitely the Pownce desktop client, a tool for sending content to your Pownce buddies and the Pownce Web site. (Pownce is currently in private alpha; jump down to the bottom of this post for info about how to request an invitation.) ... Read more
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