It’s been an experience, but it’s been worthwhile – I’ve been able to keep a few things moving whilst I’ve been on holiday. With a laptop which I took on my travels, it was easy.

Whilst I’ve been happy with the results so far, it’s been a learning experience, but this is a fairly nifty tip I picked up.

Basically, when you create a project, one of the most important things to do is communication – like pretty much anything online. If you have a good communication with your outsourcee (is that a word?), then problems will be negated. To test how well the outsourcer reads is this:-

Include in your job description an outlandish statement that people wouldn’t do. Something like “the last word of the application must be ‘weddings’.”, or – what I do – “Please address your application to Commander Zorg of The Interstellar Nebula”.

This immeidately removes time wasters or spammers who just copy & paste blurb saying their wonderful or lovely or that they kiss babies foreheads, whereas a shorter more to the point message that meets your requirements will get through.

I’ve known people to say that the first message should be in haiku form, as not only does it show that they understand, but also that they are more interested in the role than simply sending in their CV.

Do you have any tips for outsourcing?

RetroGamerVXUploading my #r3play video now, fingers crossed it works

meanmachinesmagRT @Sega_Mega_Drive: Started on the #r3play write up for #meanmachinesarchive , enjoying putting it together.

Sega_Mega_DriveStarted on the #r3play write up for #meanmachinesarchive , enjoying putting it together.

rhyswynneIn case you haven’t seen this – the coolest thing I saw at #r3play: Twitter client on a ZX Spectrum – http://bit.ly/dqmrfCTue

Of course, with something like Blackbird Pie you can embed individual tweets into your site, which can be great for tracking & blogging the key takeaways of the conference from everybody else. Furthermore it lets your blogging community know the influencers, getting them some followers.

But how about events? I did this with my recent trip around Europe with the whole purpose of blogging it, but unfortunately (for reasons I’ll explain later) it didn’t work.

You can use hashtags to microblog events that you attend. I’ve been playing around with a small script recently (with a help of ODesk) that is designed to turn your twitter feed into a post on your blog.

What you do is use a hashtag that nobody else will ever use. For my trip around Europe I used the hashtag #rhysvseurope, and for the event I tweeted last night (Burscough FC vs. Colwyn Bay) I used #buscoughvsbay. Basically silly tweets.

You can then at a later date use the Twitter Search & Blackbird Pie to get all your tweets from the event.

rhyswynneRight I’m off to Burscough for #burscoughvsbay – wish us luck!

rhyswynneOn train to #burscoughvsbay. Awfully slow going ATM.

rhyswynneTrain is running a bit late for #burscoughvsbay. May miss kick off. I NEVER miss kick off.

rhyswynneHad trouble getting in. Not because I’m scum, Burscough has the world narrowest turnstiles. #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynneBurscough come out to music & an enthusiastic DJ. I know the tune, but only as Helmut’s theme from Street Racer #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynne#burscoughvsbay bit ping pong at the moment. Freezing ones bits off.

rhyswynne#burscoughvsbay ref is so biased towards Burscough even they notice it, referring to the ref as Uncle Jim. Lovely!

rhyswynne0-0 HT. To all intents & purposes Burscough should be 1-0 up. Bay playing average. #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynne15 mins into second. Bit ping pong again! #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynne#burscoughvsbay Burscough have 4 solitary seats in one stand. I’ve been told they were 4 seats short of minimum regs. Game is terrible.

rhyswynne#burscoughvsbay YYYYYEEEAAAAHHHH….DAMMIT! Goal disallowed for offside. Sheds knocked it over from 6 yards out. Open goal. Still cold.

rhyswynneFinal score 0-0. Off to get warm in the clubhouse. Pint of fosters extra cold barkeep! #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynneTrain cancelled. Anybody going from Burscough to Manchester in the car? #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynne#burscoughvsbay Right train not arrived. Taxi not arrived. Relying on two people who are taxi drivers. In pub for cheeky half.

rhyswynneTRAINS ARRIVED!!! #burscoughvsbay

rhyswynne#burscoughvsbay finally home. 3 hours after game finished, and a £12 cab fare lighter. Tomorrow’s job? Get #northernrailpaymycab trending

The issue I had – and the warning to learn? Don’t hang around! By the time I got around to blogging about #rhysvseurope, the twitter search had archived the tweets, making them unsearchable. I could use Google, but it’s not 100% accurate, so if you are to blog an event, make sure you grab the tweets as early as you can.

The files

A WordPress plugin is made up of at least one PHP file. It can contain many other files including other php, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The plugin we are going to build will just contain a single PHP file called myprofilelinks.php.

The main file for a WordPress plugin must contain a header with contains all of the information about our plugin. Here we can say who wrote the plugin, give it a name and other information. The header is included at the top of the main file and is contained within standard PHP /* */ comment tags. The header is very simple and more information can be found here.

Hooks – actions and filters

WordPress allows developers to tap into a blog’s functionality through hooks. A hook allows a developer to execute a section of code when a specific action happens or to filter the output or input to the system (a list of all hooks can be found here). In our plugin, to add an action we use the add_action() method, and to add a filter we use the add_filter() method. What we are going to need in our filter is to add a filter that is displayed when the_content is output:

<?php
add_filter('the_content', 'addFooter'); //Add a filter that will run our addFooter function when the_content is displayed
?>

Our filter

The function we have ‘hooked’ into our blog using the add_filter() method needs to accept one parameter. The function accepts the single parameter of the content we wish to filter and then returns our filtered output. The the_content filter is run just before every post or page is output to the screen and allows us to make changes to the content. Let’s take a look at what we will do with our function:

<?php
function addFooter($content) {
if(is_page()) { //If our content is a page, do nothing
return $content;
} else { //This is a blog post so let's add on our links
return $content . '<div class="myProfileLinks"><a href="http://www.twitter.com/yourprofile">Twitter</a></div>';
}
}
?>

We now have a plugin which will add on a div to all of our blog entries that will contain a link to our Twitter profile. This can be modified using CSS to make it look better, we could change the link to an image etc. The basics of this post will allow you to create your first WordPress plugin and start modifying your blog in your own way and do whatever you want. The important thing to remember with these plugins is that you can run whatever code you want and just ‘hook’ it into the blog where necessary to give the desired output.

Installing your plugin

To install your plugin you can either upload it directly to your wp-content/plugins directory or zip it up and then upload it through the plugins menu in your admin area.

Full source code

Finally, here is the full plugin source code (excluding the header):

<?php
add_filter('the_content', 'addFooter'); //Add a filter that will run our addFooter function when the_content is displayed
function addFooter($content) {
if(is_page()) { //If our content is a page, do nothing
return $content;
} else { //This is a blog post so let's add on our links
return $content . '<div class="myProfileLinks"><a href="http://www.twitter.com/yourprofile">Twitter</a></div>';
}
}
?>

Murray Picton is an experienced PHP web developer and has worked in the industry for many years as well as producing a few WordPress plugins along the way. He has a blog available at http://www.murraypicton.com containing many posts on PHP, MySQL, Javascript and many other technical subjects. If you have liked this post, please go over to his blog and take a look at his other posts.

What is Google Alerts?

Basically, Google Alerts is a service that sends you email whenever a relevant update is made to the Google Search Listings. It’s more about new pages being indexed, and covers News, Blogs, Discussions, as well as the original search.

Notation

I will use some odd notation to format some of these alerts, this is to replace with your own stuff.

• Square Brackets [] - Replace what ever is in the square brackets with what’s described in the square brackets (for example, with this site, replace [your url] with http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/
• Standard Brackets () - This is optional & can be removed. I’ll explain why in the description.

[blog name]

This should only be used in blogs/web 2.0 search & news search. This simply tells us when you are mentioned. I’ve seen this utilised by many big web brands, with high up brand members commenting on the site to

If you release anything associated with your blog that you’ll later sell, it’d be stupid not to have this.

@[twitter name] -site:http://twitter.com (-site:[your url])

Unfortunately, you cannot find links to your twitter page (or I don’t really know how if it’s possible!), but often when people who link to your twitter page will use the keyword (in my example) “@rhyswynne”. You can track linked pages in Google Alerts, but Google is remarkably slow in showing new links to sites, so instead we’ll just search for your twitter handle being mentioned on sites.

We add the negative site operator, as we don’t want any mentions of your twitter handle on Twitter, and I also like removing my site URL as I have a lifestream on this page. You may want to add this or not.

“[a query that you can answer]“

A good one that I’ve used in the past is to monitor discussions & everything for queries you can answer quickly & easily. Say for example you sell tea cosies on your blog, you can search for “Where can I buy tea cosies online?”. Be creative. There’s no limit to the amount of searches you can do for this.

What you are searching for here is forum posts & discussions. Places you can join & answer questions. Try not to spam the forums but be useful, even answering a couple of threads before & after the target thread & contributing to discussion.

Over To You!

These are just three Google Alerts I have on my account. Do you have any that differ from the above? Do share them in the comments!

Copy page.php file & rename it to something else.

Very simple, go to your theme folder in your wp-content file & copy your page.php file. Rename it to the category you wish to target (such as 1.php or more useful web-tips.php for your “Web Tips” category).

Add The Following Lines to the page

Open the page within your web design software & add the following to the top of the file:-

<?php
/*
Template Name: Web Tips
*/
?>

Replace “Web Tips” with the name of your category.

Also, find the line that looks something like this:-

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And replace it with this:-

<?php query_posts('category_name=catname&showposts=-1&orderby=title&order=ASC'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

An explanation of the “query_posts” Line

Within the brackets of the query_posts(”) command, is where all the posts are retrieved. You may need to make a few changes. Here’s what each command (the bits between the “&”) do:-

• category_name – The name of the category you want to show posts from. Change this to your category name you want to list on your page.
• showposts – The amount of posts to show on the page. -1 means all posts will show.
• orderby - How you want to order the posts, “date” is default, for this we will use the word “title”.
• order – Can be one of two things. ASC (which means posts go from A to Z), and DESC (which means it goes from Z to A).

For this tutorial, you need to change the category_name to the name of the category. Other than that you can leave the rest.

Create a New Page With This Template

You then need to create a page with this template. To do this, click on “Page > Add New” in the sidebar, give the page a title, change the page template in the “Additional Attributes” box in the sidebar to the name of the template given in the previous step, and click “publish”. You now have a page which can be linked to from throughout the site.

Anyway, bar that, one of the most incredible things to come from the promotion has been this parody song of probably one of my favourite songs at the moment – “Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down”:-

Click here to view the embedded video.

This has pretty much been tweeted & facebooked by everybody from North Wales (myself included), but outside of North Wales, not a sausage. I guess it doesn’t resonate with them.

I’m not a viral marketer, but I do know how this works – because it mentions things that resonate with so many people (which are the towns of North Wales). We have a phrase in wrestling – cheap heat. It’s when you deliberately praise or deride the local town – Mick Foley was an expert in it. Hell I’ve done it before now & it worked. You’re more likely to connect with people.

Okay, on the flipside you sacrifice a lot of your audience who you won’t connect with, but with an area such the size of North Wales (around 250,000 people), connecting with enough of them and you should get – say – 50,000 views of a video on Youtube, which as Jordan Cooper found out & reported to on Problogger, is more than Mashable send you.

Make a ‘must comment’ list. In Google Reader, take the blogs of the top folks in your rolodex and put them in a separate ‘must comment’ folder. When you have time, go through the folder. See if any posts grab your attention. If they do, comment!

I was in the thousands for unread items in Google Reader, and many juicy blog posts were passing it by, but I’ve implemented the above tip in a slightly different way, and it’s allowed me to comment on blogs, expand my network, yet not take up too much of my time.

Create A Label Called “Must Comment” & Place It At The Top

Very simple, in Google Reader, simply create a label called “Must Comment”, and drag it to the top of  your list (behind your most important RSS if need be, such as support requests). Then the first thing I see is those sites.

I’ve also gone one stage further and unsubcribed from a lot (not all) of the other blogs I subscribe to. That way I’m not overwhelmed with thousands of new posts when I check my feeder.

Put 10-20 Blogs In There

This is key, picking 10 to 20 blogs that have a decent amount of traffic, but not overwhelming with posts or comments. You want to stand out, not fade to the background.

They vary by niche, but here’s blogs that I are in my “Must Comment List”:-

• Erica Says
• Mike’s Life
• Not a Pro Blog
• Erica.biz
• Outspoken Media
• SEO Chicks
• SEO ROI

Okay, it’s a case of “do as I say, not as I do”, as that’s less than 10. I think 10 could be the optimum number though, as 7 is fairly manageable, with often 3 or 4 new blog posts per day.

Try To Comment On One Post A Day

Again, if the blog posts don’t post anything worth commenting on, I don’t comment, but the point is to be a regular contributor at these blogs, avatars & a stand out name are a good thing as well, so people will recognise you (if you post great comments), and hopefully visit your blog, increasing traffic to your site.

But Rhys! What About All The Great Posts I’m Missing?

This is where social media comes in.

Social media is designed to share links, and I use my Twitter Favourites as my social bookmarking site of choice. I also use it to comment on other blogs, if there’s a regular comment place, I stick it in my Google Reader.

What about you? How do you comment on blogs effectively?

Spam is bad, but automated twitter accounts aren’t necessarily. A number of great twitter accounts (such as the National Rail Enquries Twitter Account) are automated, as there isn’t a need for it to be anything but – why create work for yourself? I propose that you create a twitter account purely for your blog posts. Why? Well, a number of reasons.

• It secures your brand - If your blog takes off, people will snap up Twitter usernames associated with it. Capture them first before they do.
• It allows you to promote your post twice without pissing people off - Your main twitter account (the one you network with) can retweet your automated twitter account, rather than you retweeting yourself. It does look a little better, plus you promote both your post and your twitter account.
• It disassociates you from your blog (in a good way) - Whilst you will be the person behind the blog, it’ll help build the brand around your blog. If you ever sell your blog or move on, you can give a twitter account away, so the blog will continue to be successful even without you.

So, how do you create a useful twitter account for automated posting of your blog? Here’s what you need to do:-

1. Sign Up For a Twitter Account

First off, get a twitter account. You can sign up here. Note down the username & password – you’ll need it for the next step.

2. Download Twitter Tools Plugin for WordPress

We will use a plugin called Twitter Tools by Alex King for this tutorial. Download & Install it using your chosen method of installing wordpress plugins.

3. Set Up Twitter Tools

To set up Twitter Tools, click on Twitter Tools under the settings menu in the wp-admin. A screen like this should appear:-

Insert your Twitter Username & Password into the boxes & test the login. Make sure you switch the “Create a Tweet When You Post” & Default to Yes, and the Tweet prefix to what you want. Make sure other options are switched off – you don’t want the creation of blog post of your tweets. Save, post & check your twitter accounts.

4. Integrate your Favourite URL shortener to Twitter Tools (Optional)

A number of popular URL shorteners can be integrated with twitter tools. I can’t go through the setting up of these – most use an API key which can be gained from your account on your URL shortener. Here’s some of them at least.

• bit.ly for Twitter Tools
• su.pr for Twitter Tools
• tr.im for Twitter Tools

Try it yourself! Set up a Twitter account purely for your blog. Here’s mine you can follow for my blog – @gospelrhys. What’s yours?

I am not a lawyer, but the second you create content & unless you state otherwise, it is under copyright, so it’s a good idea to have something that states that the copyright is yours. Keeping the date upto date is one of those jobs that is easily forgotten, so to automate it you need to put the following line in your footer.php file in your template:-

&copy; <?php bloginfo('name'); echo date('Y'); ?>

Nice and simple. A quick explanation for each of the elements in the code:-

• © - The HTML code for the copyright symbol: ©
• bloginfo(‘name’) - The wordpress template tag for displaying the name of the blog.
• date(‘Y’) - The current year

That’s it! You don’t have to update your footer copyright ever again.

If you want to include your year of formation in the copyright notice, put this in your footer (assuming your blog was formed in 2004).

&copy; <?php bloginfo('name'); echo "2004-". date('Y'); ?>

Again, very simple.

This can be put in any of the template files in your blog, but traditionally it’s put in the footer. Any questions & I’ll do my best to answer them.

FBML is an incredibly diverse and there’s the substansial FBML Wiki on it, so it’s easy to get lost. However, there is really only one thing you need for FBML. Most of it surrounds applications, not necessarily fan pages. There’s really only one Facebook feature you’d want for your Facebook Fan Page – Inviting People to Your Facebook Fan Page

How To Create a “Invite Your Friends” Box For Your Facebook Fan Page

Very simple, this is the code you will need:-

<fb:fbml>
<div style="padding: 10px; clear: both;">
&lt;fb:request-form method=&quot;post&quot; type=&quot;<a href="http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/offto/facebook" style=""  rel="nofollow" onmouseover="self.status='http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/offto/facebook';return true;" onmouseout="self.status=''">FACEBOOK FAN PAGE</a> NAME&quot; invite=&quot;true&quot;
content=&quot;Text to invite your friends. &lt;fb:req-choice url='<a href="http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/offto/facebook" style=""  rel="nofollow" onmouseover="self.status='http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/offto/facebook';return true;" onmouseout="self.status=''">FACEBOOK FAN PAGE</a> URL' ' label='GO' /&gt; &quot;&gt;
&lt;fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext=&quot;Invite Box Title&quot; rows=&quot;3&quot; showborder=&quot;true&quot; condensed=&quot;false&quot; style=&quot;width: 300px;&quot; /&gt;
&lt;/fb:request-form&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/fb:fbml&gt;

Simple, but it needs a bit of explanation:-

<fb:fbml> - These open/close tags mimic the <html> tags, and allows you to use FBML within a page.

<fb:request-form> - This is similar to the <form> tag, and opens a form, and has a number of attributes:-

• type: this is the app or fan page associated with the form. In this case, it’s your fan page name (including spaces, if need be. For example, mine would be “The Gospel According To Rhys”).
• invite: this states whether or not you want to send an invite.
• Content: This will be what your invitee sees on their invite.

<fb:req-choice> - This places 2 or 3 buttons on the page, which simply a yes/no choice. The “Yes” (which is defined by the “label” field), will go to whatever’s in the URL field.

<fb:multi-friend-selector> – This is the very simple friend request form, that people have seen a million times before. There are certain things you can add to it as attributes:-

• actiontext:The title of the invite box
• width: width of the box
• rows: how many rows are visible
• showborder: show the border of the box

Word of Warning

Small word of warning, there is talk of changing the way this fbml works, so the multi-friend-selector may be depreciated in the next year or so. I will post a post up as alternative if/when this happens.

Questions? Anything You Want Adding?

If you want anything added to this, or anything you want to learn, do let me know!

Your Homework

Add an invite to your facebook fan page, and share it in the comments!