Made of Everything You're Not

Fuck, I hate Twitter; yet another tool to allow people to collect, well… people really. As an example, I signed up for a Twitter account so I could test Twitter functionality for some projects I’m working on. I don’t use Twitter for anything but testing yet I get notices daily about users now following me (and none of them are readers of this blog).

Tweetmeme

Still, Twitter is all the rage and I do have to admit it is fun working with all the little toys people are making with the Twitter API (playing with the API is really FUN).

One such tool is TweetMeme.

Accoring to the TweetMeme site:

Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweetmeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

We make it easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through aur RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, you can find out more about theses through our help.

TweetMeme has a few ways to integrate their data into your site. The easiest way works by giving site owners a little sliver of JavaScript to embed in their site. The JavaScript adds a little button to the page for one click tweeting on Twitter.

<script type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>
<script src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:1--></script>

The above creates a little icon:

TweetMeme Icon

In theory, the above is all you’ll need to do; just drop that slip into a page and you’re good to go. The reality is that there are a couple rules you need to follow.

First, make sure you’re using a custom title meta for your pages. If you don’t all your Tweets will have the same title. Not good.

Second, make sure the page in question is open to the Internet. Don’t try and lock the page behind a log in barrier or TweetMeme won’t be able to parse the page to get the URL and title information.

Last, TweetMeme caches the data so don’t expect the update to be instant; you will be disappointed. For example, on the Dark Void site we are constantly being hit up by the client about the delay. You probably won’t see the number in the widget increment for a bit; there’s nothing you can do about it.

TweetMeme also offers a widget, which I admit I haven’t used and but it looks like it’s basically the same thing as Tweetizen.

It should be noted that I wasn’t able to get the TweetMeme Widget to work. Ever. It just shows a blank page. Good job, TweetMeme.

And of course, there’s the TweetMeme API. You just have to have an API to be taken seriously. It does seem a little redundant to have an API that’s populated with data from the Twitter API but, whatever. I haven’t looked at the API too much either but it doesn’t look too outside the norm for most APIs.

Anyway, there you go; TweetMeme. Marketers love it. I’m ambivalent.

There’s a pretty positive review of wp-click-track on Daily Blog Tips, written by Daniel Scocco, today and it’s official; wp-click-track doesn’t suck. Not that it’s good, it just doesn’t suck  

Daily Blog Tips

It’s always nice to see that someone has an opinion about something I’m involved in (good and bad). This is especially nice because it’s on Daily Blog Tips, a site I actually read and enjoy.  

Thanks for the review Daniel.

My first post was on October 21st 2008 and after 6 months my blog is still not getting much traffic. On average I get about 50 hits a day, mostly to the wp-click-track page and not the actual blog, and as of the time I posted this I only have 6 Feedburner subscriptions (and I’m pretty sure I work with all 6 people).

Blogging for 6 Months

Doing a quick inventory of my blog leads to the below stats:

1. 80 posts published
2. 20 drafts (I work on a few posts at a time)
3. A crap load (that’s the technical term; crap load) of code released.

It was my initial goal to use my blog as a repository of all the cool stuff I do on a day to day basis and on that front the blog has been a success. I have a nice database of cool php and IT related posts; everything from working with social networking sites to manipulating zip files with php to how to not suck at email marketing.

It’s pretty apparent, that at this moment in my blogs life, NO ONE CARES.

Check this out:

Boobs.

Nothing. No outcry. The world is still here.

Nice.

Apparently this isn’t out of the ordinary though. According to Jeff Atwood it’s important to be patient:

The blog is no different. I often give aspiring bloggers this key piece of advice: if you’re starting a blog, don’t expect anyone to read it for six months. If you do, I can guarantee you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you can stick to a posting schedule and produce one or two quality posts every week for an entire calendar year… then, and only then, can you expect to see a trickle of readership. I started this blog in 2004, and it took a solid three years of writing 3 to 5 times per week before it achieved anything resembling popularity within the software development community.

So it looks like I shouldn’t really care about people reading my blog until October 2010 and it may take as long as 2012 until my blog reall starts to matter. Bummer…

That doesn’t mean I should just sit back and wait; that’s never a good idea. To help the process along, I started looking at submitting my blog to a few of the blog aggregators. Supposedly, WordPress already does this for a bunch of blog aggregators but the only incoming links I have are to wp-click-track. I wasn’t so sure a ping was all that’s required.

I registered my blog with syndic8, Technorati, Yahoo, LinkedIn, WeBlogAlot, Blogged to name a few. Some of the sites required that I prove ownership of my blog by either including a graphic, adding a new meta tag or creating a temporary file on your blog.

Really, a HUGE pain in the ass that didn’t do a thing for me. Let me be clear: There’s been ZERO impact from having my blog on those sites. Maybe, maybe, I get a couple hits a day from all the sites combined, but that’s it.

Lesson: if you’re just a random guy starting a blog don’t worry about submitting to those sites.

I also released quite a bit of code. This has been where the majority of my traffic comes from. So far, I’ve released only 2 “official” projects (both WordPress plugins). Considering it’s only been half a year and they’ve both been downloaded, collectively, over 1,000 times I’d say it’s been a bit of a success.

What’s the next 6 months going to be like? Can’t wait to find out.

So a couple days ago I finalized the beta of a new WordPress plugin: wp-click-track. But, well, no one knows about it yet. Which is a shame because it’s pretty cool (IMHO anyway). What to do… what to do?

Turns out there are all sorts of options available to promote your plugin.

A warning though: you will need to create multiple online identities with a few websites and none of them offer OpenID so be sure to crack open your identity manager before starting. (BTW, WTF is up with that? I mean, even WordPress makes you create different identity to host a plugin. This is in addition to your current WordPress account. Get it together people!)

Anyway, here’s a list of places to start:

Plugins/Plugin Compatibility Wiki*
Select the version(s) of WordPress your plugin is compatible with and add your plugin to the compatibility list.
*You have to sign up for an account first!

Add Your Plugin to WordPress.com
By signing up with WordPress you get access to the subversion repository for managing your plugin. You already have to know subversion (but of course you already do; I’m sure). Just fill out the form and you’ll receive an email with instructions on how to add your files to the repo.

One more note on the WordPress Plugin Repository; pay attention to the format of your readme.txt. The format of this effects your plugin page on the site; if the format is off your page won’t be accurate and there’s about a 5 minute delay between when you update the repository and when the changes show up online. Be sure to check out the readme.txt validator to make sure the format’s ok.

Fill out the form and submit. NOTE: You’ll need a different set of credentials.

wp-plugins.net
Pretty basic here: Create account, fill out form. I’m not really sure how trafficked this site is but it’s recommended by WordPress.com for plugin so there you go.

Weblog Tools Collection
They seem to have an ongoing list of new and updated plugins.