Use Gravatars in Your Own Site and Software

Gravatars are becoming not just a popular addition to your website or service, but an essential part of making your users feel part of a friendly, welcoming community. You will  have seen the small smiling faces around websites, blogs, communities and web service software tools.

If you are using WordPress then Gravatar support is now built in. Other software or services might be supported too. When you are developing your own software tool or service though you might feel out of luck.

Well, good news! Adding Gravatar support to your own software is easy :)

A gravatar is simply an image hosted centrally at Gravatar.com using the following URL structure.

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Where xxxx would be replaced with the unique identifier for the particular users Gravatar.

How to do you discover the unique ID for a user? Simple – the key string is simply the person’s email address put through an MD5 conversion.

So my Gravatar is http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/772bb0ad28f9cdd045aca3ac25500a12 which is chris ..at.. chrisg … .com, and when used, creates the following JPG image. If you want to convert an email address to an MD5 hash, simply use this helpful web service. Enter the email address, convert it, then copy and paste the result at the end of the Gravatar URL above, replacing the unique ID with your new one.

Most programming languages have an MD5 function available, for example in PHP you would use the md5() function:

echo md5($email);

.. to output the MD5 hash of a supplied email address.

You can also optionally add a size parameter in the form ?s=300 where the size is in pixels.

Eg.

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/772bb0ad28f9cdd045aca3ac25500a12?s=300

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/772bb0ad28f9cdd045aca3ac25500a12?s=300

Has WordPress Come of Age as a CMS?

This week I have been building a membership site using WordPress as part of a challenge I set myself for the Authority Blogger Course members. I have until 3pm today my time to finish it and get it on sale. I might actually succeed, even despite the power being off in my area all morning :)

The project is for me to create a course on setting up WordPress based websites, and it got me thinking about how WordPress is not just a blog package for many of us any longer. I have written about this a little before but I think the idea has gone from being a geeky curiosity to an established fact. Course members added lots of ideas to my already growing list of ways this application can be used.

In the last year I have set up dozens of customer’s corporate websites using the software. This is not unusual, even the Number 10 Downing Street (home to our country “leadership”) runs on WordPress.

Here is a list of types of WordPress site I managed to come up with. I am sure you will agree, it can do more than just blog …

1) Blog (text, podcast, video) - OK, this one is obvious and goes without saying, but I think it is important to note how WordPress has given content creators an easy platform that does not require being tied into gated communities and paying through the nose for the privelage.

2) Static site / company website - As mentioned above, this is so common place now that I can’t imagine using anything else.

3) Lead capture site / Squeeze page - Lately I have been using WordPress for gathering contact details through free offers (send someone to a site where they can get something cool in return for putting in their contact details). Where before I would have used a static HTML site, using WordPress allows me to rapidly test, tweak and optimize the conversion rate. Plus there are other pages like privacy page and so on that need to be set up using a similar look and feel.

4) Single product sales site – Where before I might have used a download service, one of those download protector software packages, or some other system to deliver my digitial products like ebooks and videos, now I can use WordPress plus Wishlist member plugin to protect my download products. Not only does it provide a convenient and secure download area, but it reduces customer support through having built in password recovery, and also allows me to “drip out” bonuses.

5) Multi-product ecommerce site – Once you start selling from your WordPress site, it doesn’t take a leap of imagination to start thinking about selling multiple products from the same site.

6) Reviews site – Think back to when you last booked a hotel or vacation. You probably visited at least one review site. Affiliate marketers often like to set up a site where you review products in return for a sale commission on anything that is purchased. WordPress makes building one of these sites so much easier.

7) Photo gallery – It’s not just Facebook, Flickr and Picassa that can be used to display your photography, and WordPress is ideal if you don’t just want to show off but to sell your work.

8) Twitter-style site – Automattic released a special theme just for creating an internal or group Twitter type site where you can interact with short “tweet” type posts. This is great for project management, group notifications and discussion.

9) Membership site – If you want to create a password protected client area, online course, or monthly “continuity”, as mentioned earlier, WordPress is now ideal when used with Wishlist, but also much easier and cheaper to work with than the alternatives.

10) Resume – The resume is dead. Long live the resume blog! Much like company sites, if you are not filling Google with positive references then you don’t exist when it comes to certain jobs, and it is only going to increase in liklihood that your HR rep looks first to Google before checking any of your paper credentials.

I have a couple of hours to finish this WordPress based online course. Wish me luck!

Any more ideas for how WordPress is being used over and above blogging? Please share in the comments …

Move from Last.fm to Spotify and the End of MP3

You may recall a while ago I tried out a service called Spotify that streams music to your computer. Well, since then I have had a chance to really try it out, and here are my findings.

The days of MP3 are numbered, and compact disks have taken their last breath.

Bold statement? Maybe, but I think it is true.

I have around a months worth of music in iTunes (somehow!), I have a 60gb iPod, and a 16gb iPhone. What do I listen to? … streamed music from Spotify.

Even in the car! My old iPod has been a great boon for long car journeys, especially since we bought a car with an Aux input rather than use FM transmitter.

But even that fully stuffed iPod can not compare with having a massive library of music at the touch of a button.

What about when you are outside 3g range or on a flight you say? Buy a monthly subscription to Spotify and you can have your playlists reside offline. All the benefits of mp3 files but with none of the storage, backups, filetransfer problems, and if you are bored with them you hit delete and find some new stuff.

The one big problem of course is you no longer own your music, you rent it. But really, I think that is a small thing. I can see iTunes moving to a pay as you go model where when you buy some music you can stream it or cache it offline for one price, and also go with a monthly all you can eat subscription at another.

I have even moved from Last.fm to only listening to Spotify. It’s just so convenient.

It’s the future!

Here is how I moved from Last.fm to Spotify:

  1. Install the Greasemonkey addon for Firefox.
  2. Add the spotify last.fm greasemonkey script.
  3. Go to your Last.fm loved tracks with the Greasemonkey script running.
  4. Next to each track you will see a little green musical note, click that note to be taken to the track in Spotify
  5. Add the track to your Spotify playlist

Unfortunately right now the Spotify keyboard shortcuts are a bit lacking so creating playlists can be a chore, but I am sure they will work on that.

Spreading Your Video With TubeMogul

Recently I have been getting back into giving video a try. Now, I have to say, video does not come naturally to me, but customers and audience members are demanding it, and who am I to say no?

So I have been learning what I can, testing, experimenting, and generally having a good old play, starting with some video I captured during a recent speaking trip.

media_1250522270403.png

As you will no doubt know if you have tried doing web video yourself, just getting the video created is a task in itself. Lately with the debut of the Flip style cameras, the smart phones all getting easy features, and most computers now coming with at least some kind of basic video editing, creating video is not the chore it once was.

Getting the video online is as simple as can be as there are now a gajilion sites out there that will convert, host and display your video for free or a small fee. Of course the king of the video sites is YouTube so that is what I started with.

The next challenge, that of getting people to view your video, is an even bigger challenge. While my small experiments are hardly ready for prime time, I need to learn how this video marketing stuff works if I am going to teach it to my clients.

During my reasearch I have been hearing lots of good things about TubeMogul which is a video distribution service that sends your video out to all the popular web video communities out there in one go. I thought I would try it out and let you know how good my experience goes.

media_1250522298459.png

Singing up with TubeMogul is a snap, it is all nicely and intuitively laid out, with a clear navigation and design. I can see me using this and enjoying it.

As soon as you are signed up you can set about uploading your first video. You simply find the file on your machine and set it about uploading. There is a handy progress bar and you can leave it working while you go to the next step.

media_1250522501296.png

While your video uploads you can set all the information about your video such as description and tags. If you are going to get any traffic you need to spend some time figuring out what people will be looking for and giving a description that makes people want to view.

media_1250524505456.png

The real chore in the whole process is signing up with all the video services out there and adding your user details into TubeMogul. This does take a while so grab a coffee or a red bull else you might snooze before you are finished and drool is not good for your keyboard!

media_1250524467832.png

As you progress you can check in to see how your video is getting on. Before long you will have your video spread around the web, and all the tough bits are a one-off process, so you can start churning out your content knowing that the hard work has already been done.

In summary, if you want to distribute your video I highly recommend TubeMogul. It could save you hours in upload time alone. While it is not the traffic magnet that some spammy SEO gurus would have you believe, it does not need to be magical to be useful, and useful it certainly is.

Make Writing Documentation 101% Easier With ScreenSteps

ScreenstepsIn my consulting work and product creation I have to write a LOT of step by step instructions.

When creating these instructions you basically have two choices:

  1. Use a video screen capture tool to make a walk-through, edit the video down, add voice over, convert to a usable video size and format, upload or send to client.
  2. Create a document using screen grabs, annotate with explanatory text, compile into a PDF, send to client or upload

For the first case I use a Mac application called ScreenFlow, while PC users will likely have heard of Camtasia. These work fine for video, where video is warranted and when you have the time and quiet to do this.

The second though becomes a laborious task. It is necessary to do lots of fiddly little activities, and switch between multiple applications.

That is where ScreenSteps comes in. What it does is enable you to be far more productive with the step by step instruction process, either using the built in tools (all the way from capturing images, adding arrows and annotations, through to exporting as PDF), or by integrating with your favorite applications.

You might think that integrating with your existing tools goes counter to what I just said about it removing task switching, but in fact this app does something very cool and forehead-slappingly obvious that I can not believe I did not already have a utility that does it.

What it does is watches your clipboard and any time you add an image to the clipboard it pastes it into the step by step workflow that you are creating. Once you are done you can stop this “recording” and then go through adding instructions and anything else that needs to be clarified. At the end you can export as Word to finish the document editing part, rather than send directly to a finished PDF.

You can even create your own templates to further automate the process.

There is a free trial, after which you need to buy either

I think it is a bargain considering all the time I will save.

See below for an example that I just exported:

Example

How Do You Create a Powerful StumbleUpon Profile?

Top Stumblers

It is clear from website traffic reports that not all stumbles are created equal.

Traditionally the rule has been to get as many votes as possible. Quantity is of course an important factor, it is a lot like a popularity contest in this regard. Using the share features, the web based toolbar, and Twitter to garner more votes has become commonplace.

Variety is also important, you do not want the same faces voting on the same domains, otherwise it looks suspect and the system shuts those votes down or discounts them.

There is more to it though. As well as quantity of votes, there seems to be a quality score going on as well.

  1. Weak versus powerful accounts send fewer initial visitors
  2. Votes after discovery amplify the original strong or weak vote, almost like a multiplier of an initial score
  3. More subsequent votes amplify the original review more or less strongly

Getting votes from strong accounts is essential if you are going to reap the full benefits of StumbleUpon.

So how do you create a good StumbleUpon profile?

Here is the official stumbleupon definition:

Top Stumblers are our most active and helpful community members. These members frequently suggest new sites to be included in our database, and frequently rate new sites they stumble upon.

When you submit a site, it is shown to other stumblers (for evaluation). If those people like your suggestion (by rating it I-like-it! often) your community ‘Karma’ will increase.

Your Top Stumbler rank will also increase by frequent rating. You do not need to rate every site you see, but if it stands out as particularly excellent (a website you really like) or bad (you don’t like it, or it is spam), make sure you rate it. This regular participation will increase your Top Stumbler rank.

That is useful to know for growing your own power account. Essentially, participate. A lot.

As well as having our own good accounts, we also need to make friends with other stumblers. How do you recognize someone who has a good account?

These are the very top StumbleUpon users. Notice anything about them?

Essentially a strong account will show a level of activity over the norm, a high number of “favorites”, and a high number of “subscribers”. Plus you can tell if they are a quality user, see how many testimonials they have and the kind of bookmarks they favorite.

Also look to see your compatibility rating to see if they like the same stuff as you do.

If you take a look at my StumbleUpon profile, I have a fairly good account even though I spend less than 30 mins a week on it. It is not up there with the best, but pretty decent.

There are a good number of positive reviews of my stumbling, and I actually participate in the service rather than pimping my own stuff :)

That is the key to most social networking, it is about participating and adding to the community rather than just taking from it.

With StumbleUpon what you put in you get back out. Your participation is rewarded.

As I say above, you do not want to be stumbling the same domains over and over, and that includes your own.

The main benefit of having a powerful account is to help other people. By doing this favor you will get noticed – people look at their web stats and see traffic coming from StumbleUpon, then look to see who submitted and reviewed.

Consider it another valuable “pay forward” tool in your social networking portfolio!

Get More Organized with Evernote

How do you organize the tons of content that you are hit with each day? What do you do with the ideas, notes and to-do items that spring to mind throughout your work?

As a social media fan I have been getting a lot of use out of social bookmarking tools such as Delicious and even StumbleUpon. This has helped me store away web links, and organize them by tagging, but not the actual content.

For storing actual content that I find I have been using an excellent tool from Iterasi which allows you to “notarize” pages and save them online in folders and tagged for later access as if frozen in carbonite.

Evernote is a tool that aims to do both tasks, but in addition does a whole lot more, including text recognition in images – even hand written notes!

So you can record

I only heard about Evernote today from @masontech from DidIGetThingsDone, and I am glad I did.

The very best part, and the item that was most compelling to myself, was the fact that it syncs online, desktop and your iPhone. This means you have access to this content archive and all your notes wherever you are, even from your pocket.

So you can grab a piece of content from an ecommerce store or online review using your browser bookmarklet or plugin, and store it on the Evernote website. Later you can pick that note up while shopping on your iPhone. When you get home you can log into your desktop application and organize everything.

Very cool.

It does not end there. You Get Things Done fans can use Evernote to help you with your GTD productivity processes, as shown in this article. Very cool.

For now I am using a free account but will be upgrading to the premium account as it is only $5 a month which upgrades your capacity, speeds up image processing and removes the advertising.

Do you use Evernote or anything like it? Please let me know in the comments …

How to Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic

How do you know if your Twitter activity is paying off?

An obvious return on investment is more people reading your tweets and as a consequence checking out your website. This certainly does work, but apart from a gut feel that you are gaining visibility, how do you know exactly what you are doing is working, and in particular, the specific attempts that worked and those that fell flat?

Luckily the free and fabulous Google Analytics can help you out …

Track URLs With Campaigns

The problem is Twitter users rarely use the Twitter.com website to read and tweet. This means there are many many desktop and mobile applications, and these applications do not send referrer information to Google Analytics.

Google has a special URL builder designed to help you construct campaign URLs for advertising tracking, but we can use them for our Twitter linkage just the same.

The neat thing about hooking everything up in analytics is that you can track these visits all the way through to conversion, either as a subscriber or to see if the Twitter visitor buys from you.

Tool: URL Builder - Analytics Help

Of course this tool produces huge URLs, so your next job is to shorten down to preserve more of those precious 140 characters that we are allowed for each tweet.

I use a service called Cli.gs – interestingly Cli.gs also tracks clicks, or I should say attempted clicks as the number who reach the destination never matches what the service claims to have sent …

My Cligs

Now this is not an entirely clear picture because it only tracks clicks on the URLs that you have created. How can we track our total Twitter traffic?

Advanced – Google Analytics Profile and Filter

What about the traffic that we did not initiate, but came from Twitter and other microblog services?

To get around this we need to detect them and aggregate using Analytics Profiles and Filters.

First you need to add a new profile …

Analytics Settings - Google Analytics

… making it for an existing rather than new domain …

Create New Website Profile - Google Analytics

Once created you need to hit Edit

Analytics Settings - Google Analytics

Scroll down and add a new filter

Profile Settings - Google Analytics

Create New Filter - Google Analytics

Add the settings exactly as you see here.

MacSpeech Dictate Review

MacSpeech Dictate is a voice recognition and dictation system for Apple Macs. While the Windows world has Dragon Dictate, the Macosx world has so far been pretty under served in this kind of software, with all previous efforts not coming up to the standard of Dragon.

Then we hear that MacSpeech had licensed some of the wonderful Dragon technology and had built a native Mac dictation system from the ground up. This I had to try. My aching wrists and my ever-growing to-do list were begging me.

When I first heard about MacSpeech I thought it sounded like my dream of having Star Trek style computer control. As it turns out, while the system is brilliant, and far more advanced than really we should hope for, it is in fact not quite at the point where you can simply talk to the computer and have it understand your every word.

As you can see though in the video, you can talk pretty fast and have it still follow what you’re saying. The problem I have is having to think about everything consciously, including punctuation, and all that good stuff.

You can see and hear me thinking through this article and dictating it and you can see the MacSpeech reaction to everything that I am saying. Most of the awkwardness is coming from me rather than the system.


[Video may not play in email/feed so click through to view]

When you read the instructions it does tell you that you need to train the system and go through a fair bit of work to get the MacSpeech software to understand what you. In fact, in my experience it is training me that is going to be difficult, not training the software.

On receiving the package I went through the setup procedure and within an hour or less I was tweeting and e-mailing using the software. That’s pretty impressive.

My main difficulty of until now has been learning the keyboard controls and forcing myself to keep my hands off the keys. As it says in the manual you should either dictate or type, not try to do both. That is proving to be very difficult indeed!

Is it more efficient than typing? For me right now possibly not, but that is no fault of the software. It’s more about the amount of time I have dedicated to learning the system and a new approach to creating content. That said, I am certainly going to persist with it because I think it will help both my productivity and RSI.

In conclusion, I think the package is an amazing achievement and is only getting better as they release updates. Already I can see it being extremely beneficial in creating first drafts of content very quickly. I just need to buckle down and RTFM :)

Creating Easy Video Interviews Using Oovoo Software Tool

Video is all the rage at the moment in the blog world so it shouldn’t really surprise me when someone asks to do a video interview. The surprising thing though is unlike a normal video interview where someone points a camera at your face, this video interview took place hundreds of miles apart using a tool I had not seen before, Oovoo.

Oovoo is meant to be a video conferencing tool. You can also send contacts video messages, like an email but in video. Pretty neat.

But why is this newsworthy or different? Yes it has a strange name, but most startups these days seem to go for odd names don’t they?

What the software does have to set it apart, as well as the standard video conferencing features that you would expect, is have a built in recording feature. Perfect for no-brainer interviews.

Installing on Windows or Mac is easy. On my Mac it detected my Macbook webcam right away. It only took a few seconds to work out how to enable my headset rather than the internal speaker.

Only speed-bump was I had to reboot to get it to realize my webcam wasn’t in use. It thought some other application had hold of it and would not release it. Bug or my machine? Who knows.

It did work very well after that. You can see the result here. Please ignore my communication skills and admire the software, heh. You might learn something about using social media for tourist industry I guess too.

As you can see, both participants are displayed side by side, and apparently you can have up to 6 people on the call at once.

That’s pretty good taking into account the bandwidth use and considering how much some audio-only conference lines cost. For a free service it is absolutely wonderful.

Try it out, it is very cool.

Really Oovoo makes it all very easy. Only challenge is remembering to dress up and get your hair right so you are ready for your close up ;)

Next Page →