Google FriendConnect API is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Twitter is great for traffic, but just how great it is, well, you'll never really know. Why not? You'll ask. Well, the only traffic you'll see coming from Twitter is traffic that comes through Twitters web interface. And most people I know don't use the web interface, they use desktop and / or phone clients. Because these clients aren't browsers, they won't pass along a referrer, and thus register as "direct traffic".

I won't even try to estimate what percentage of Twitter usage goes through the API, although I've heard people say it's up to 80 or even 90%, although Twitter Stats seems to report it as around 50%, and Twitstat.com as 60%. So you're getting a lot of clicks that look like "direct traffic" in your Analytics, but are in fact, not direct traffic. These people will behave differently than normal people who come to your site directly.

In an effort to improve the reliability of my Google Analytics stats a bit, I've decided to start adding Google Analytics campaign, medium and source variables to all my own tweets in which I promote my own posts. I know from cli.gs, the URL shortening service I tend to use, that my tweeted links get up to 300 clicks each, and I'd love to track the behavior of those people on my site.

So I've made a small "in between" script that I can use in a bookmarklet. What it does is simple:

1. it grabs the URL and title from the request
2. it adds the UTM variables ?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter
3. it does a request to cli.gs through its API to create a shorturl
4. it then redirects to twitter.com/home with the status set to that shorturl

Download the script here, and then modify this bookmarklet to use it:

javascript:(function()%7B%20window.open('http://www.example.com/clig.php?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&utm&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title));%20%7D)();

Set example.com to the domain name and path where you uploaded it.

This should allow you to create shorturls with the campaign tags in it, and thus track those tweeted links in your own analytics!

The analytics issue with Twitter is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'd never developed Widgets for Apple's Dashboard yet, but I had seen Dashcode, and that it seemed pretty easy to use. So I started going about developing a TwitterCounter Dashboard widget, and well, I succeeded. It looks like this:

You can download it here.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

TwitterCounter Dashboard Widget is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Last night, in the beginning of the evening, @michielb twittered that he made a list of most used Twitter clients. I thought it looked pretty cool and asked him if that was measured by unique users or total tweets. He said it was by amount of tweets, to which I responded I'd like to know which clients users twittered the most, eg. which client makes twittering the easiest.

He immediately went ahead and added that to the Twitter Clients list, which I tweeted about to my followers:

Twitter addicts, check the cool stats @michielb made, ranking twitter clients: http://cli.gs/bPdnqP twitterberry users are most active :)

This tweet got retweeted a couple of times, resulting in a total of 84 clicks towards the list, of which 66 by humans, as counted by my favorite URL shortener of the moment: cli.gs. A couple of minutes later, Michiel tweeted to me that he was getting an enormous amount of traffic through StumbleUpon, as shown by this traffic stat:

Within a couple of hours of this happening, the list made it to TechCrunch. How's that for Twitter power?

Michiel followed up on the whole story with a blog post of his own, reflecting the lessons learned in this small experiment: the navigation on that list was poor, he didn't get anything out of it other than some visitors to his page, where he could have been promoting his awesome web-based twitterclient Twitstat. So, if you make cool, unique content like Michiel did, make sure you prepare to get something out of it if it hits the major (tech-)news sites!

The power of Twitter (clients) exposed is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I emailed him last week, asking why TwitterCounter didn't have an API, and we started talking about what an API should do. He started developing it, showed me some code, and then I offered him to develop the API myself. So I did, resulting in this API.

On top of that API Sean Hammons already implemented a pane for getClicky, and I myself created a Pepper for Mint. It looks like this:

Like it? Download it here

TwitterCounter: the API and the Mint Pepper is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I've been using Twitterific and Twinkle side by side for a while, but both annoyed me at times. They look like this:

I was missing the easy to reach replies tab, and found both to be a tad bit slow. I remembered from this post from Chris Brogan that he used Twittelator, so I downloaded that and played around. It's better, but it's not as simple and solid as I want my client to be. It's color schemes look cool though, check out this one:

The bad thing about it is that it takes too much screen per tweet, which makes it hard to read a lot of tweets quickly.

Now that I had installed 3 apps already, I thought what the heck, let's try the other ones. I found Twitterfon, and I think this one is here to stay. It's got everything you need, from a replies and direct messages tab to your normal timeline. It supports GPS and taking pictures and search with a history of your recent searches. And, to boot, it's by far the fastest Twitter app on my iPhone to start up. It looks clean like this:

Best thing about it? It's free!

So basically, I think Twitterfon will be my primary iPhone Twitter app for the coming months, as it seems to be everything I need from a Twitter client!

Twitter iPhone apps side by side is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It turned out to be incredibly easy, as long as you have PHP 5.2 or higher, that is.

This is the code:

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php');
$snoopy = new Snoopy;
$snoopy->fetch("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jdevalk.json?count=1");
$twitterdata = json_decode($snoopy->results,true);
echo "<p>\"".$twitterdata[0]["text"]."\"</p>";

As you can see, I use the Snoopy library to fetch the data, as that comes with WordPress by default. Than I decode the JSON results by using the json_decode function. This is the reason you need PHP 5.2 or up, as this was only included with this version of PHP.

Next, we output it. Of course, this is a quick & dirty implementation. If I got dugg now, and 1,000 people a minute came looking at that page, it should have some sort of caching in there. For now though, this is fine as it is!

Update: As Kim noticed in the comments, I've added some code to automatically link any @username mentions to those usernames. Replace the last echo line above with this:

$pattern = '/\@([a-zA-Z]+)/';
$replace = '<a href="http://twitter.com/'.strtolower('\1').'">@\1</a>';
$output = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[0]["text"]);
echo "<p>\"".$output."\"</p>";

You could even decide to add rel="nofollow" the $replace if you don't want those links to give juice.

Update 2: To make it even more complex, here is the entire code I now use, which excludes replies and caches the Twitter API requests so you won't overload the API:

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require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php');
$tweet   = get_option("lasttweet");
$url  = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jdevalk.json?count=20";
if ($tweet['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() - 60 ) ) {
  $snoopy = new Snoopy;
  $result = $snoopy->fetch($url);
  if ($result) {
    $twitterdata   = json_decode($snoopy->results,true);
    $i = 0;
    while ($twitterdata[$i]['in_reply_to_user_id'] != '') {
      $i++;
    }
    $pattern  = '/\@([a-zA-Z]+)/';
    $replace  = '<a href="http://twitter.com/'.strtolower('\1').'">@\1</a>';
    $output   = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[$i]["text"]);  
 
    $tweet['lastcheck'] = mktime();
    $tweet['data']    = $output;
    $tweet['rawdata']  = $twitterdata;
    $tweet['followers'] = $twitterdata[0]['user']['followers_count'];
    update_option('lasttweet',$tweet);
  } else {
    echo "Twitter API not responding.";
  }
} else {
  $output = $tweet['data'];
}
echo "<p>\"".$output."\"</p>";

As you can see it also saves the amount of followers you have into $tweet['followers'], which I then use to display this:

<p>
  <a href="http://twitter.com/jdevalk">
    <?=$tweet['followers']?> followers on Twitter, and you?
  </a>
</p>

Update 3: Another fix to automatically make all links clickable, below this line:

$output = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[$i]["text"]);

Add:

$output = make_clickable($output);

This will use the WordPress internal make_clickable function to make sure that all URL's are clickable.

Enjoy!

Easily display your last Tweet is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

This seems like the best moment to do a short recap of what's happened in the last few years, and to see what the future will bring. Allow me to boast about Onetomarket a bit, and tell you about what we've reached.

The last few years at Onetomarket have been like a sitting in a roller coaster, in the positive and joyful sense. Onetomarket has developed from a good but not to big online marketing agency into a European player, competing with the best in the business. Our offices in Spain are doing great, not in the least because of the tremendous work of Lennert de Rijk there, and our German offices are becoming more serious everyday.

At the same time we've been able to make a name for our selves at the big conferences in the search marketing and affiliate world. One of the high points of the year was A4UExpo in London last year, which I'll attend again this year. My buddy and colleague Roy will be making his first appearance as a speaker on the SEO scene there.

I've had the chance to participate in very exciting and successful projects with clients like KLM and Wegener (and many others), of which I'm very proud and have had a load of fun with.

You're probably asking yourself right now: if everything is going that well, why are you leaving? The answer is simple: my interests have widened, especially towards the social aspects of communication on the web. The chance that has been offered to me in that sector, combined with the chance to build on a new company, made me decide to leave.

To quote my favorite book, "markets are conversations". I will be focussing on more on these conversations, and on the chances these conversations have to offer to companies.

The team I'm leaving can operate fine without me. They're the best SEO team you'll find in the Netherlands. The paid search team is great as well, and I can't even start to begin about the fantastic things a couple of relatively unknown talents are doing in the Analytics part. My leaving this company should be a trigger for them to make themselves heard a lot more!

And then, the future. My new job is within a company called Orangevalley. You'll be hearing a lot more about Orangevalley in the coming weeks!

I've had a great time at Onetomarket, and I'd like to thank all my colleagues for that. I'd also like to thank the management for all the trust they've placed in me. I wish Onetomarket loads of success, and will be following their development closely!

Leaving Onetomarket is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

To make it to the front page, you currently need 200+ diggs. Getting there with anything other than an exceptionally good and well-targeted post, or with a lot of "help" is neigh to impossible.

I was talking to my buddy Chris Winfield of Social Media Marketing firm 10e20 about whether it's bad for a site to be submitted too much, his answer:

It depends on how its done. If it's very obvious spam from the same user, then, yes, it's bad for your site's performance in Digg. If it's natural - then it's no big deal. But it also depends on what type of site it is. If you run a widget factory and somehow everyone of your pages is getting submitted to Digg, natural looking or not - it's no good.

That's why I've taken the Digg button out off my Sociable setup. I'd rather control a bit more what I submit to Digg and what not. Of course it doesn't prevent people from submitting, but making it a bit less easy might actually lower the amount of Digg submissions that have no chance at all of making it to the front page.

Digg submit buttons: a good idea? is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!