SnowBlog: The Snowball Factory Blog » wordpress http://blog.snowballfactory.com Performance marketing for social media Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:10:38 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Tweet Button with Shortening for WordPress http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2010/08/15/tweet-button-with-shortening-for-wordpress/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2010/08/15/tweet-button-with-shortening-for-wordpress/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:54:53 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.snowballfactory.com/?p=378 On Thursday, Twitter released their ‘official’ tweet button. By default, it uses Twitter’s t.co URL shortening, which means it will display an excerpt of the full link in the tweet. But some folks, like our awe.sm customers (yes, I mean that both ways :-) ), want to easily use the new official tweet button with 3rd-party tracking tools.

So, we’ve whipped up a WordPress plugin that supports awe.sm, bit.ly, tinyurl, su.pr, and digg URLs as well as some other nifty features.

Get the plugin here

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Here’s the full feature list:

  • Configure the placement of the button on your posts: top; bottom; top & bottom; or manual
  • Choose the type of Twitter tweet button you want: vertical count; horizontal count; or no count
  • Optionally use awe.sm, bit.ly, tinyurl, su.pr, or digg to shorten the links shared through the tweet button (default is Twitter’s t.co)
  • Specify the via Twitter username to be included at the end of the tweet and in the recommended users to follow screen after the tweet
  • Optionally add the author of a given post to the recommended users to follow screen after the tweet (requires the author to enter their Twitter username in their WP profile)
  • Disable the button on Pages

Use 3rd-party URL shorteners, like awe.sm, and specify the via username.

Add the author of a given post to the recommended users to follow after the tweet.

Try it here:

This plugin is primarily based on the excellent BackType Tweetcount plugin and I adapted part of the post author code from the also excellent Twitter Publisher plugin.

If you have any issues or feature requests, please let us know at support+tbws [at] awe.sm.

A note for awe.sm customers:

The current awe.sm integration in this plugin is a bit of a hack. It will use your links on your awe.sm-powered domain, however it is currently using a single static link per blog post instead of our standard approach of a unique awe.sm link per tweet. This means that your stats for links shared via this plugin will have accurate total clicks but only a single share per original URL and inaccurate clicks per share (and of course parent-child relationships between tweets won’t work).

We are working on a way to get the full benefits of awe.sm tracking with the official tweet button, but it will be a few weeks before that is ready. In the meantime, we are continuing to use and recommend the BackType Tweetcount plugin.

]]> http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2010/08/15/tweet-button-with-shortening-for-wordpress/feed/ 1 New and Improved fbShare.me Button http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/10/26/new-and-improved-fbshare-me-button/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/10/26/new-and-improved-fbshare-me-button/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:47:32 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.thesnowballfactory.com/?p=274 It’s been a little over a month since we first launched our sharecount button for Facebook and what a month it’s been. With very little promotion, our weekend coding project was quickly being served on over 5M pageviews per day. And now, Facebook has released an official version of their own.

As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:

  • Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
  • Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
  • Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
  • When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface

We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:

  • Support color customization in plugin
  • Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
  • Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript

At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:

Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the button even more useful.

]]> http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/10/26/new-and-improved-fbshare-me-button/feed/ 5 Testing the new Twitter Publisher WP Plugin http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/06/11/testing-the-new-twitter-publisher-wp-plugin/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/06/11/testing-the-new-twitter-publisher-wp-plugin/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:45:05 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.thesnowballfactory.com/?p=227 WP plugin developer Timan Rebel just launched a new WP plugin called Twitter Publisher, which is a great way to automatically tweet new blog posts when they are published.

Twitter Publisher supports both bit.ly and awe.sm to shorten the links going to Twitter, and it will even add Google Analytics campaign parameters to the bit.ly links for you (awe.sm does this automatically ;-) ). But the coolest feature IMHO is the ability to give the author of the post credit in the tweet. This is great for larger blogs with multiple authors. However if you’re just rolling solo, it’s not a huge advantage over Twitterfeed (which also supports awe.sm :-) ).

We’re gonna test it out on this blog to see how it works, but probably stick with Twitterfeed on my personal blog for now.

Update: It looks like there are still some bugs in the Twitter Publisher plugin, specifically it is ignoring the setting to use awe.sm and using bit.ly instead. We’ve alerted Timan, and hopefully he will release a fix soon.

Update 2: The plugin should be working correctly now.

]]> http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/06/11/testing-the-new-twitter-publisher-wp-plugin/feed/ 0 Suggest to Techmeme button for WordPress http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/02/04/suggest-to-techmeme-button-for-wordpress/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/02/04/suggest-to-techmeme-button-for-wordpress/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:27:00 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.thesnowballfactory.com/?p=119 As noted in the (several updates to the) original post, the javascript code I wrote for the ‘Suggest to Techmeme’ button won’t work when inserted into posts on self-hosted instances of WordPress (unless you have the Exec-PHP plugin installed, like I do on my personal blog). There is already a very popular plugin for adding sharing calls to action to your blog posts called Sociable, and it happens to be very easily extensible.

So, I just created a custom version of the Sociable plugin that includes ‘Techmeme’ as an option (you can see it in action on my personal blog — it’s under the Share This widget at the bottom of each post). For those of you running self-hosted WordPress blogs, just download my version of the plugin here and install and activate it as you would any normal plugin. Then, go into Settings>Sociable and check ‘Techmeme’. That’s it!

A few requests have been made to include URL shortening functionality into the button, and I’ve got a few ideas I’m going to send to Joost, the guy who maintains the Sociable plugin. Maybe we can come up with something cool together. Stay tuned… ;-)

Again, for those of you who missed it:

DOWNLOAD THE WORDPRESS PLUGIN HERE

If you have no idea what this is all about, read up on Techmeme’s new suggest via Twitter functionality on TechCrunch or the Techmeme blog.

Suggest to?

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