Just a couple of weeks back, FeedBurner, without much fanfare, stepped into the social arena. As it is with Google, the surprise came as an extremely useful feature: Automatic Tweeting based upon your feed.
Bloggers who use FeedBurner to publish their feeds can immensely benefit from this new addition. It does away with one whole extra step of using a third-party client (or the Twitter website) for publicizing your posts.
How does it work?
Upon publishing a new post…
- FeedBurner immediately grabs your post’s title
- Shortens the post’s URL using goo.gl (another recent introduction)
- Adds any custom messages and hashtags that you’ve set
- And posts it to your Twitter profile
… and the while making sure that the tweet doesn’t exceed 140 characters. Pretty cool ay? If required, it can set set to leave room for retweets too.
The tweeting feature can be setup via the Publicize tab of FeedBurner using this new sidebar item titled Socialize.
If required, tweets can be sent to multiple Twitter accounts. For detailed explanation of individual settings, see here.
Is you ask me, this feature is certainly going to obsolete quite a few WordPress plugins offering similar functionality.
Yesterday I came upon a couple of splogs ripping off my feeds and publishing the content as their own – lock, stock and barrel (if I may), including the ugly SHA1 hash that I was using as a digital fingerprint to detect content theft.
Digital fingerprints (a unique combination of random characters) happen to be a very good way of nabbing content rippers. 99.99% chances are…
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I take great pleasure in introducing “Shunya“ – a brand new blog of mine.
Shunya is my second blog and is primarily going to be a reflection of my experiences as a webmaster at the Stamford International University as well as some of the choicest picks on numerics & computing.
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Those guys at WordPress are really at it!! They’ve been churning out code like crazy As a result, the all new WordPress 2.6 has been officially released – a month ahead of schedule!
Here’s a quick rundown of the latest features…
Post revisions – WordPress 2.6 features Wiki-like tracking of edits, in effect acting like a version control system. This comes in real handy in…
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Following my review of Defensio, Michael Hampton (of Bad Behavior fame) left a comment on the same post assuring that Bad Behavior would run just fine along side Defensio without causing any sort of hiccups for the latter. My thoughts exactly – since Defensio operates more or less on the same principles as that of Akismet, whereas Bad Behavior’s modus operandi is a bit different.
Instead…
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Another quick announcement. I just released another version (0.9) of curreX – the Ajax based Currency Converter widget for WordPress.
Starting from this version, curreX also includes a Flash based widget and provides you with the option of selecting between the HTML/JavaScript version and it’s Flash counterpart from the widget configuration panel of WordPress.
A quick preview of the flash widget can be obtained from here. I’m…
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Here’s a quick tip for those who have been plagued with problems while using curreX v0.7 (the Ajax based Currency Converter Widget for WordPress). I’ve released a new version v0.8 yesterday, fixing most of those issues.
Please grab a copy from here or the WordPress plug-in repository and update your installation to fix all the earlier problems.
If you run into any problems with this version, there’s…
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Right since the beginning of my blogging career, I’ve been using Akismet in conjuction with Bad Behavior to weed out spam from my blog. Akismet is as a natural choice since it comes parcelled with WordPress installations. As for Bad Behavior, I decided to use it after reading plenty of articles on effective spam filtering.
Akismet has worked just fine for me so far. It has…
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