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!

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!

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!

Plugin updates: Google Analytics and Sociable 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 hooked on Twitter for a while now, (I'm @jdevalk, follow me!) and I use Twitterific mostly when I'm at my Mac. Rae invited me and a couple of other people, through Twitter of course, to do a small review of the program we use, in my case, Twitterific (sorry, Mac only).

So here we go:

1. Start by downloading Twitterific.
2. Unzip the DMG file, and move Twitterific, with the cool icon on the right, to your Applications folder
3. Start up Twitterific, add in your Twitter account details, and you'll see a window which looks something like this:

You can tweak the settings, of which it has quite a few, to change stuff like the refresh speed:

Now the fun starts, as Twitterific has some great shortcuts:

• ⌘R - Refresh list of tweets
• ⌘K - Mark all tweets as read
• ⌘2 - Reply to the selected tweet (using "@name")
• ⌘D - Send a direct message
• ⌘â†? - Open the user's Twitter page

There are more, you'll find them on the Twitterific page. This is, as you can see, a good looking application, well worth the $15 they ask to remove the ads, which it shows by default. Now there are some other peepz who have made similar posts about their own favorite Twitter apps, check them out:

• A look at Twitterfox
• Twhirl Twitter Client Review
• TwitterTools: Wordpress and Twitter
• TwitterBerry app for BlackBerry and Twitter
• Twitterfeed Review
• Using Netvibes for Twitter
• TwitBin - Microblogging Made Easy
• The Guide to Being a Drunken, Debaucherous Twit

Twittering with Twitterific 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 also:

• Fixed the StumbleUpon issue which multiple people have been dealing with
• Removed the auto-update stuff because that's now dealt with by WordPress itself
• Nofollowed all links
• Added the plugin to the WordPress plugin repository, find it here.

You can download it here: Sociable - Social Bookmarking for WordPress.

If you have any suggestions, social bookmarking sites I should add or other stuff: drop them in the comments!

Sociable WordPress plugin take-over 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!

[code language="php"]
function FrontpageDiggs($url) {
$result['source'] = "http://digg.com/rss_search?search=".$url."&area=promoted&type=url&section=all";
$output = file_get_contents($result['source']);
preg_match_all("/.*().*/",$output,$matches);
$result['result'] = count($matches[1]);
return $result;
}
[/code]

Now if you echo $result['result'], you'll get the number of posts for $url that made the frontpage.

Get the number of popular digg posts for a URL 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!

MSN Reporter still buggy 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!

More on this in a few days...

MSN Reporter... 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 things even worse, you can vote, or "kick" in their terminology, for a story by simply calling a URL...

Now of course you can script this, which I did:

<?php
        $i = 1;
        while ($i < 1000) {
                file_get_contents("< kick-url >");
                echo $i;
                $i++;
        }
?>

I ran this script for a few seconds, and before I knew it, the story was on the MSN.nl homepage...

Now come on MSN, you can do way better than that!

[tags]MSN, reporter, digg, spam[/tags]

MSN launches Dutch Digg clone, but forgets spam prevention 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!

David Temple and Andy Beal asked for feedback and what I'd learned from this experience, so here are my thoughts on the whole thing.

In the end, I ended up second, traffic wise, but since the winner was also in my week, I didn't make it to the finals. Perhaps in the next contest, they could include a wildcard for the overall most traffic drawing article, so you'd get five articles in the judges round. Now there's to things I regret, not doing in this competition, and there were some issues that made it harder than I thought it would be.

The first thing I should have done, was submitting earlier. I entered in the last week whereas I had been working on the article for the week before that. Had I finished earlier, and done the same for the traffic, I would have easily entered the final round. Yet I didn't. The second thing I regret, is the fact that I didn't get more friends to blog about me. I could have done more traffic out of that, yet I thought that the few very well-read blogs I'd put a mention of the article on would be enough.

There were some other things I tried, the most important one being Digging the article. How naive... Of course I wasn't the first to think of that, and because of that (at least that's what I think...), MarketingPilgrim had been banned from Digg... I had 50-something friends ready to get the digg started, so this was a real setback...

But hey, no more mourning, no use to that, I did quite ok on the traffic side, and I had some fun with it as well. Now I have thought of a two things that would be nice for the next contest, in which, if allowed, I will enter again. Here they are:

• Include a wild card for the most traffic driving article that doesn't make it to the finale otherwise.
• It would be cool if the competitors could see stats during the week my article ran, had I seen those, I would have increased my effort.

To boot, I have a question for Andy: I'd like to know what spam preventions you took... I had been thinking of simply 302-ing some of my websites to yours for a few days, had I done so, I'd probably won the first round...

[tags]contest, sem, seo[/tags]

What I've learned in the SEM scholarship contest 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!

Niall Kennedy has an excellent article, uncovering such a spam network and it's motives. He shows how it's relatively easy to abuse these services to quickly gain links, even with articles unrelated to your site's content. The article in question is a weight loss article, placed on a dental care website...

For people fighting spam, and I don't just mean Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik, but also those Wikipedia spam fighters out there, this is a very nice read, and helps to understand these spammers and the way they work.

Spammers using social media 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!