<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <rss
version="2.0"
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"><channel><title>Yoast &#187; Twitter</title> <atom:link href="http://yoast.com/tag/twitter/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><link>http://yoast.com</link> <description>Tweaking Websites</description> <lastBuildDate>Mon, 21 May 2012 18:33:54 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency> <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4-beta4-20825</generator> <image><title>Yoast</title> <url>http://yoast.com/wp-content/themes/yoast-v2/images/yoast-logo-rss.png</url><link>http://yoast.com</link> <width>144</width> <height>103</height> <description>Tweaking Websites</description> </image> <item><title>Search &amp; Social &#8211; you can&#8217;t get the cream out of the coffee</title><link>http://yoast.com/search-social-cream-coffee/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=search-social-cream-coffee</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/search-social-cream-coffee/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:47:03 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Facebook]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=40904</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>Yesterday, Google launched "Search plus your World", intermixing search and social and providing even more "personalized" results. There's a lot of outcry about some parts of this, with people saying they don't want "personalized" results. I actually think that normal users do want personalized results and that this is, for the most part, a good thing. [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/search-social-cream-coffee/">Search &#038; Social &#8211; you can&#8217;t get the cream out of the coffee</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Yesterday, Google launched "<a
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html">Search plus your World</a>", intermixing search and social and providing even more "personalized" results. There's a lot of outcry about some parts of this, with people saying they don't want "personalized" results. I actually think that normal users <em>do</em> want personalized results and that this is, for the most part, a good thing.</p><p>There's been some outcry though, because Twitter and Facebook aren't "highlighted" as much as Google+ in those new social results. Danny is doing some awesome reporting on this, first in "<a
href="http://searchengineland.com/search-engines-should-be-like-santa-107400">Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”</a>", later <a
href="http://marketingland.com/schmidt-google-not-favored-happy-to-talk-twitter-facebook-integration-3151">in an interview with Schmidt</a>.</p><p><img
class="size-full wp-image-40905 alignright" title="wordpress-seo-personalized" src="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wordpress-seo-personalized.png" alt="" width="272" height="123" />Google used to have access to the Twitter firehose, all the tweets coming in in realtime, enabling them to index tweets at light speed. Facebook used to show some friends of a person on a profile to visitors to that profile who aren't logged in, now look at <a
href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fjdevalk&amp;pws=0">the cache for my Facebook profile</a>: just other people with the same name.</p><p>As I said in a reaction to a <a
href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/105076678694475690385/posts/6K9j9RHA2tC">Google+ post by Jeff Jarvis</a>: what both Twitter and Facebook are afraid of is that they're "giving" "their" social graph to Google, thereby allowing Google to easily grow its own social network because it would make it <strong>very</strong> easy for Google to suggest friends to you or say "these friends of yours already use Google+, shouldn't you use it too?". So by opening up, they'd open their books to a competitor.</p><p>This, ultimately, should be a users choice, not a platform choice. When it does become a user choice, of course Google should favor the social network the user is the most active on, so if I'm more active on Facebook than on Twitter or Google+, it should highlight that above the others. Right now, it seems to be mostly highlighting Google+, which will raise some eyebrows here and there and is food for discussion.</p><p>A while back at the first Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels, <a
href="http://www.basvandenbeld.com/">Bas van den Beld</a> of <a
href="http://www.stateofsearch.com/">State of Search</a> interviewed <a
href="http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/">Olivier Blanchard</a> and myself about search and social. We talked about how the two intertwine and can't be unraveled, in fact, as Olivier said during the interview: "it's like coffee and cream, once they mix you can't get the cream out of the coffee". See the interview here (the sound is not the best ever, I know):</p><p><iframe
width="580" height="326" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Hm-pzHKOBFU?fs=1&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p><p>The thing is: this is a done deal. There's no way back. Search and social have now officially teamed up, so you might as well live with it. It also means that <em>not</em> using Google+ is... Not really an option if you're a marketer, but I guess we had that one coming for a while as well.</p><p>So, what does this mean from a tactics perspective? For now, it means: share every post on Google+ too, make sure you have Google+ buttons on your posts and, most importantly: keep building relations with people! It's not like that much changed; social mentions might have become a new and maybe even important ranking factor, but even quality links are usually the result of a relation, of social interaction.</p><p>The formula to success didn't change: you have to keep building relations / followers / an audience, create great content and make sure people notice it.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/search-social-cream-coffee/">Search &#038; Social &#8211; you can&#8217;t get the cream out of the coffee</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/search-social-cream-coffee/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>45</slash:comments> <media:content url="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Hm-pzHKOBFU" duration="867"> <media:player url="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Hm-pzHKOBFU" /> <media:title type="html">Search &#38; Social - you can&#039;t get the cream out of the coffee &#8226; Yoast</media:title> <media:description type="html">Yesterday, Google launched &#34;Search plus your World&#34;, intermixing search and social and providing even more &#34;personalized&#34; results. There&#039;s a lot of outcry about some parts of this, with people saying they don&#039;t want &#34;personalized&#34; results. I actually think that normal users do want personalized res</media:description> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/search-social-you-cant-get-the-cream-out-of-the-coffee-8226-yoast-300x225.jpg" /> <media:keywords>Facebook,Twitter</media:keywords> </media:content> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wordpress-seo-personalized-125x123.png" /> <media:content url="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wordpress-seo-personalized.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">wordpress-seo-personalized</media:title> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wordpress-seo-personalized-125x123.png" /> </media:content> </item> <item><title>Are ads preventing your posts from being shared?</title><link>http://yoast.com/ads-social-sharing/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ads-social-sharing</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/ads-social-sharing/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:16:24 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Usability & Conversion]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=8357</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>I like sharing links on Twitter, I've been trying to find a good way of doing that without overloading people, and think I've found the solution in Buffer App, which allows me to buffer my tweets. As a result of that, I'm tweeting a lot more links. What I find though, is that I'm reading [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/ads-social-sharing/">Are ads preventing your posts from being shared?</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I like sharing links on Twitter, I've been trying to find a good way of doing that without overloading people, and think I've found the solution in <a
href="http://bufferapp.com/r/b7de5">Buffer App</a>, which allows me to buffer my tweets. As a result of that, I'm tweeting a lot more links. What I find though, is that I'm reading a lot of articles that I like, but which I wouldn't want to share, not because of the content, but because they're so surrounded by links.</p><p>A good example is <a
href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/2-firefox-addons-show-invisible-web/">this post</a> by Ann Smarty on the MakeUseOf blog. It's a good post that could have pointed many readers at 2 nice addons, but I'm hesitant to share it, because of the ridiculous ads. I don't like in-content ads, but I can live with one of them. Having 3 of them though, 1 annoyingly situated just below the title so I had to search for the intro, is just too much and bordering on the plain spammy.</p><p>So, when you're adding ads to your site, consider this: they might make me money, but do they prevent me from making more money? If so, don't add those ads!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/ads-social-sharing/">Are ads preventing your posts from being shared?</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/ads-social-sharing/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>13</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Web Intents from Twitter</title><link>http://yoast.com/web-intents-from-twitter/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=web-intents-from-twitter</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/web-intents-from-twitter/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:01:39 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Webdesign & development]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=6179</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>At the end of March Twitter released a cool new feature called "Web Intents". I didn't really see the value of it till recently, but I've now started using it way more. When you have a Tweet button on your site, you're already using the Web Intents API, but you can do way more cool [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/web-intents-from-twitter/">Web Intents from Twitter</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>At the end of March Twitter released a cool new feature called "Web Intents". I didn't really see the value of it till recently, but I've now started using it way more. When you have a Tweet button on your site, you're already using the Web Intents API, but you can do way more cool things. Check out the Twitter integration on the top left of this site, which looks like this:</p><p
style="text-align: center;"><img
class="size-full wp-image-6182 aligncenter" title="Web Intents Twitter integration" src="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tweet-integration.jpg" alt="Web Intents Twitter integration" width="303" height="44" /></p><p>There are three things in that integration that should catch your eye. If you click on "Yoast", that's what Twitter calls a "follow intent". So when you click on that link, Twitter generates a popup that looks like this:</p><p><a
class="thickbox" href="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/follow-intent-yoast.jpg"><img
class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-6183" title="Follow Intent - Web Intents" src="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/follow-intent-yoast-590x518.jpg" alt="Follow Intent - Web Intents" width="580" height="509" /></a>I think that's pretty cool. You're welcome to disagree, of course, but then you might as well stop reading now. Twitter generates similar popups when you click on the retweet and reply buttons, right behind the text of the tweet.</p><h2>How to create Web Intents</h2><p>Creating these Web Intents is hilariously easy. You need the normal JS library that you have for the follow and tweet buttons, so there's no need to include anything else. Here it is:</p><pre class="brush: xml; light: true; title: ; notranslate">&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot; src=&quot;http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;</pre><p>Then, a "follow intent" link, is crafted as easily as this:</p><pre class="brush: xml; light: true; title: ; notranslate">&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=yoast&quot;&gt;Yoast&lt;/a&gt;</pre><p>That's easy right? That's <em>all</em> you need to do. Let's check the other web intents, starting with the retweet intent:</p><pre class="brush: xml; light: true; title: ; notranslate">&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/intent/retweet?related=yoast&amp;tweet_id=&lt;ID&gt;&quot;&gt;</pre><p>All you have to do is replace the <code>&lt;ID&gt;</code> with the tweet to be retweeted. A reply intent is crafted just as easily:</p><pre class="brush: xml; light: true; title: ; notranslate">&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?related=yoast&amp;in_reply_to=&lt;ID&gt;&quot;&gt;</pre><p>There's no need to use extra JavaScripts, write extra code, nothing. Feel free to just use this in your theme, your posts, wherever and Twitter's script will change it for you. In <a
href="http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents">their documentation</a> for Web Intents, Twitter provides you with images to use as well, which I'm using too, as you can see.</p><p>Now I'd like to hear from you! Do you have creative ways of using Web Intents?</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/web-intents-from-twitter/">Web Intents from Twitter</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/web-intents-from-twitter/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>23</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tweet-integration-125x44.jpg" /> <media:content url="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tweet-integration.jpg" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Web Intents Twitter integration</media:title> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tweet-integration-125x44.jpg" /> </media:content> <media:content url="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/follow-intent-yoast.jpg" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Follow Intent &#8211; Web Intents</media:title> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/follow-intent-yoast-125x125.jpg" /> </media:content> </item> <item><title>Social Buttons: Adding them to your site &amp; Tracking them</title><link>http://yoast.com/social-buttons/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=social-buttons</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/social-buttons/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:48:20 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Analytics]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Clicky]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Facebook]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Google Analytics]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress Plugins]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=5866</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>I've had a lot of questions recently (like literally, several a day) on how I implemented the social buttons in WordPress, whether I was using a plugin or using a theme. First of all I'm glad to see all of you noticing my social buttons section so much. Second, I'd love to share with you [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/social-buttons/">Social Buttons: Adding them to your site &#038; Tracking them</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I've had a lot of questions recently (like literally, several a day) on how I implemented the social buttons in WordPress, whether I was using a plugin or using a theme. First of all I'm glad to see all of you noticing my social buttons section so much. Second, I'd love to share with you how I built this, because I actually made it load nice and fast too and would love for you to have that.</p><p>In full "shape" my social buttons look like this:</p><p><img
class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5868" title="social buttons in WordPress" src="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/social-buttons-in-wordpress.png" alt="social buttons in WordPress" width="572" height="66" /></p><p>There are several plugins that do social buttons in WordPress. As a lot of you may know, I used to maintain a plugin called Sociable back in the day when social buttons where all still 16x16, simple, buttons. At some point, I think it was Digg that introduced the script based social button with a counter in it, which was later on adopted by several social sites. To date, there are many many social bookmarking sites that have widgets like these. Not every site needs all of these social buttons. I picked the 5 that work for me, your mileage may vary.</p><h2>How did you implement these social buttons in WordPress?</h2><p>I hear you thinking "get on with it already". Ok ok ok. Here we go. It's not a plugin. It's in my theme. Which doesn't mean it couldn't be a plugin, it's just that it'd be pretty hard to embed them in my site as sweet as these social buttons are embedded right now, using a plugin.</p><p>So they're in my theme. As you can guess, the buttons themselves are a <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-template-part/">template part</a>. This template part is actually rather small and simple, it looks like this (line breaks added for readability):</p><pre class="brush: php; html-script: true; title: ; notranslate">&lt;ul class=&quot;social buttons&quot;&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
    &lt;fb:like href=&quot;&lt;?php the_permalink() ?&gt;&quot; send=&quot;true&quot; 
      showfaces=&quot;false&quot; width=&quot;120&quot; layout=&quot;button_count&quot; 
      action=&quot;like&quot;/&gt;
  &lt;/fb:like&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
    &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/share&quot; data-url=&quot;&lt;?php the_permalink(); ?&gt;&quot; 
      data-text=&quot;&lt; ?php the_title(); ?&gt;&quot; data-via=&quot;yoast&quot; 
      class=&quot;twitter-share-button&quot;&gt;Tweet&lt;/a&gt;
  &lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
    &lt;g:plusone size=&quot;medium&quot; callback=&quot;plusone_vote&quot;&gt;&lt;/g:plusone&gt;
  &lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
    &lt;script type=&quot;in/share&quot; data-url=&quot;&lt;?php the_permalink(); ?&gt;&quot; 
      data-counter=&quot;right&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
  &lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
    &lt;div id=&quot;stumbleupon-button&quot;&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;</pre><p>As you can see, these are the "regular" buttons for most of these services, with that exception that all of them are lacking the script tag. Back in february, Frederick did an awesome post on his blog about <a
href="http://www.w3-edge.com/weblog/2011/02/optimize-social-media-button-performance/">optimizing the performance of widgets &amp; buttons</a>. I used the knowledge in this post, but took it a few steps further.</p><h2>Loading these Social Buttons script files</h2><p>Let's start with Facebook. Their asynchronous code works quite well. First, make sure you have a <code>fb-root div</code>:</p><pre class="brush: php; html-script: true; light: true; title: ; notranslate">&lt;div id=&quot;fb-root&quot;&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</pre><p>Then load the JavaScript, (all of the code samples below should be within <code>&lt;script&gt;</code> tags):</p><pre class="brush: jscript; title: ; notranslate">
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
  FB.init({appId: '&lt;APPID&gt;', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
};
(function() {
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type = 'text/javascript';
  e.src = document.location.protocol +
     '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';;
  e.async = true;
  document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
}());</pre><p>This loads the Facebook JS once the page load is done, which works quite nice and then loads the app. Later on we'll be adding code to track all the interaction with the Facebook buttons, but let's load some other social buttons first.</p><p>The other scripts I'm going to load using jQuery. Not only do I load them asynchronously, I only start loading them when the page has actually already completed rendering. The code to do that for the Twitter share button looks like this:</p><pre class="brush: jscript; title: ; notranslate">jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  // Load Tweet Button Script
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
}</pre><p>And LinkedIn, Google's +1 and StumbleUpon's buttons work in the same way:</p><pre class="brush: jscript; title: ; notranslate">jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  // Load LinkedIn button
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 'http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
  // Load Plus One Button
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
  // Load StumbleUpon button
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 
  'http://www.stumbleupon.com/hostedbadge.php?s=1&amp;a=1&amp;d=stumbleupon-button';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
}</pre><p>You could even simplify this further by just making it an array and looping through it, but for readability's sake I didn't do that.</p><h2>Tracking Interaction with Social Buttons</h2><p>When Google released +1, I quickly identified <a
href="http://yoast.com/plus-one-google-analytics/">how to track interaction with that button</a>. The obvious "follow up" was questions from people on how to track interaction with other buttons. Not for each of these social buttons tracking of interaction is actually possible. It depends on how the button was designed whether this will work or not. I got it working for Twitter and Facebook, so I'll share the code for tracking interaction with their respective social buttons below.</p><p>For Facebook, it's pretty well documented around the web how you can track the interaction with their buttons. I played around a bit and came up with the following implementation, which tracks the interaction with my like &#038; send buttons <em>and</em> with the big like box on the right. It tracks the interaction in both Google Analytics and <a
href="http://yoast.com/out/getclicky/">getClicky</a>.</p><p>Instead of just the above <code>FB.init</code> line, we'll do the following:</p><pre class="brush: jscript; title: ; notranslate">window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
  FB.init({appId: '&lt;APPID&gt;', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
  FB.Event.subscribe(&quot;edge.create&quot;,function(response) {
    if (response.indexOf(&quot;facebook.com&quot;) &gt; 0) {
      // if the returned link contains 'facebook,com'. It is a 'Like' 
      // for your Facebook page
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Like',response]);
      clicky.log(response,'Facebook Like Facebook Page');
    } else {
      // else, somebody is sharing the current page on their wall
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Share',response]);
      clicky.log(response,'Facebook Like / Share Post');
    }
  });
  FB.Event.subscribe(&quot;message.send&quot;,function(response){
    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Send',response]);
    clicky.log(response,'Facebook Send Post');
  });
};</pre><p>As you can see, if you can read a bit of code, this will create different events for each of the different optional actions. Now, let's do the same for the Tweet button (using examples based on <a
href="http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents-events">their docs</a>, but switched to async):</p><pre class="brush: jscript; title: ; notranslate">// Load Tweet Button Script &amp; Associate Google Analytics Tracking
var e = document.createElement('script'); 
e.type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;; e.async = true; 
e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
$(e).load(function() {
  function tweetIntentToAnalytics(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      var label = intent_event.data.tweet_id;
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'twitter_web_intents', 
	    intent_event.type, label]);
      clicky.log(document.location.href,'Twitter '+label);
    }      
  }       
  function followIntentToAnalytics(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      var label = intent_event.data.user_id + &quot; (&quot; + 
	   intent_event.data.screen_name + &quot;)&quot;;
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'twitter_web_intents', 
	   intent_event.type, label]);
      clicky.log(document.location.href,'Twitter '+label);
    }    
  }       
  twttr.events.bind('tweet',    tweetIntentToAnalytics);
  twttr.events.bind('follow',   followIntentToAnalytics);
});</pre><p>LinkedIn has an API for these things, at least, <a
href="http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1291">it has documentation</a> for it, but it doesn't work in my testing and quite a few people are complaining on LinkedIn's developer forums as well. For StumbleUpon there's no documentation to be found and it doesn't seem to be possible at this time to track interaction with their social button.</p><p>All of this is pretty geeky, I know, but there's a lot of value in both implementing these social buttons in a good and fast way and measuring all these interactions. Seeing which sort of social buttons work for which types of traffic can really help you find what you should be optimizing how.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/social-buttons/">Social Buttons: Adding them to your site &#038; Tracking them</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/social-buttons/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>58</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/social-buttons-in-wordpress-125x66.png" /> <media:content url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/social-buttons-in-wordpress.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">social buttons in WordPress</media:title> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/social-buttons-in-wordpress-125x66.png" /> </media:content> </item> <item><title>User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9</title><link>http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wp29/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=user-contact-fields-wp29</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wp29/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:40:26 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1593</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>I've been frustrated for ages with how WordPress deals with user profile fields. There's a "default" set of contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this is actually dealt with in the [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wp29/">User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I've been frustrated for ages with how WordPress deals with user profile fields. There's a "default" set of contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this is actually dealt with in the backend of WordPress, and found out that it wouldn't take too much work to fix it into something more decent.</p><p>In ticket <a
href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10240">#10240</a> I proposed that these user contact fields were filterable, and wrote a patch for it. With some help from Mark Jaquith the patch became clean and nice, and a few weeks back Peter Westwood was so kind as to commit it. So now, starting with 2.9, we'll be able to filter user contact fields.</p><p>This works very easily, the code below adds Twitter and removes Yahoo IM, and yes, this is all the code that's needed to do it:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">function add_twitter_contactmethod( $contactmethods ) {
  // Add Twitter
  $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';
	
  // Remove Yahoo IM
  unset($contactmethods['yim']);
 	
  return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter('user_contactmethods','add_twitter_contactmethod',10,1);</pre><p>How cool is that? Can't wait for 2.9 to come out now, can you? :)</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wp29/">User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wp29/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>16</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>The analytics issue with Twitter</title><link>http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=twitter-analytics</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:01:51 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Analytics]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Google Analytics]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1334</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>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. [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/">The analytics issue with Twitter</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<div
style="float:right; margin: 0 0 5px 5px;"><script type="text/javascript">digg_url = 'http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/';</script><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div><p>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".</p><p>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 <a
href="http://tweetstats.com/twitter_stats">Twitter Stats</a> seems to report it as around 50%, and <a
href="http://twitstat.com/twitterclientusers.html">Twitstat.com as 60%</a>. 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.</p><p>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 <a
href="http://cli.gs/">cli.gs</a>, 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.</p><p>So I've made a small "in between" script that I can use in a bookmarklet. What it does is simple:</p><ol><li>it grabs the URL and title from the request</li><li>it adds the UTM variables <code>?utm_campaign=twitter&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_source=twitter</code></li><li>it does a request to cli.gs through its API to create a shorturl</li><li>it then redirects to twitter.com/home with the status set to that shorturl</li></ol><p>Download the script <a
href="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/clig.txt">here</a>, and then modify this bookmarklet to use it:</p><pre class="brush: jscript; title: ; notranslate">javascript:(function()%7B%20window.open(&amp;#x27;http://www.example.com/clig.php?url=&amp;#x27;+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+&amp;#x27;&amp;amp;utm&amp;amp;title=&amp;#x27;+encodeURIComponent(document.title));%20%7D)();</pre><p>Set <em>example.com</em> to the domain name and path where you uploaded it.</p><p>This should allow you to create shorturls with the campaign tags in it, and thus track those tweeted links in your own analytics!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/">The analytics issue with Twitter</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>71</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Tweetbacks for WordPress</title><link>http://yoast.com/tweetbacks-wordpress/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tweetbacks-wordpress</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/tweetbacks-wordpress/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:58:14 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Usability & Conversion]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress Plugins]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1324</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>For those who you who've been following me on Twitter (if you don't, it's about time, I'm @jdevalk!), the fact that I was working on a Tweetbacks plugin for WordPress is no news. We've just officially made the announcement on SmashingMagazine, so go read how to implement it there and install Tweetbacks for WordPress on [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/tweetbacks-wordpress/">Tweetbacks for WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>For those who you who've been following me on Twitter (if you don't, it's about time, I'm <a
href="http://twitter.com/jdevalk">@jdevalk</a>!), the fact that I was working on a Tweetbacks plugin for WordPress is no news. We've just officially <a
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/09/tweetbacks-plugin-for-wordpress/">made the announcement</a> on SmashingMagazine, so <a
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/09/tweetbacks-plugin-for-wordpress/">go read</a> how to implement it there and install <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/tweetbacks/">Tweetbacks for WordPress</a> on your blog!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/tweetbacks-wordpress/">Tweetbacks for WordPress</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/tweetbacks-wordpress/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>45</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>TwitterCounter Dashboard Widget</title><link>http://yoast.com/twittercounter-dashboard-widget/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=twittercounter-dashboard-widget</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/twittercounter-dashboard-widget/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:15:02 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1316</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>I've recently had some fun with developing the TwitterCounter API (to which we've added Twitter Rank yesterday) and my first Mint Pepper for it, and I decided it was time to add another milestone to my development career. I'd never developed Widgets for Apple's Dashboard yet, but I had seen Dashcode, and that it seemed [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twittercounter-dashboard-widget/">TwitterCounter Dashboard Widget</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I've recently had some fun with developing the <a
href="http://twittercounter.com/?inc=api">TwitterCounter API</a> (to which we've added Twitter Rank yesterday) and my first <a
href="http://yoast.com/twittercounter-api/">Mint Pepper</a> for it, and I decided it was time to add another milestone to my development career.</p><p>I'd never developed Widgets for Apple's Dashboard yet, but I had seen <a
href="http://twittercounter.com/?inc=api">Dashcode</a>, 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:</p><p><img
src="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/twittercounter-dashboard-widget.png" alt="twittercounter dashboard widget" width="308" height="159" /></p><p>You can download it <a
href="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/TwitterCounter.wdgt.zip" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p><p>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.</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twittercounter-dashboard-widget/">TwitterCounter Dashboard Widget</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/twittercounter-dashboard-widget/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>14</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/twittercounter-dashboard-widget.png" /> <media:content url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/twittercounter-dashboard-widget.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">twittercounter dashboard widget</media:title> </media:content> </item> <item><title>The power of Twitter (clients) exposed</title><link>http://yoast.com/twitter-clients/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=twitter-clients</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/twitter-clients/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:54:12 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1314</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>This story shows the power of Twitter and how you should always be prepared for major traffic spikes. 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 [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-clients/">The power of Twitter (clients) exposed</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This story shows the power of Twitter and how you should always be prepared for major traffic spikes.</p><p>Last night, in the beginning of the evening, <a
href="http://twitter.com/michielb">@michielb</a> 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.</p><p>He immediately went ahead and added that to the <a
href="http://twitstat.com/twitterclientusers.html">Twitter Clients list</a>, which I <a
href="http://twitter.com/jdevalk/status/1092164736">tweeted</a> about to my followers:</p><blockquote><p>Twitter addicts, check the cool stats @michielb made, ranking twitter clients: <a
href="http://cli.gs/bPdnqP">http://cli.gs/bPdnqP</a> twitterberry users are most active :)</p></blockquote><p>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: <a
href="http://cli.gs/">cli.gs</a>. 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:</p><p><img
src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/197/3161055210_8e00834fd1.jpg?v=0" alt="Traffic stats on Twitstat.com"/></p><p>Within a couple of hours of this happening, the list <a
href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/02/twitstat-study-blackberry-users-are-totally-addicted-to-twitter/">made it to TechCrunch</a>. How's that for Twitter power?</p><p>Michiel followed up on the whole story with <a
href="http://www.michielb.nl/2009/01/a_few_lessons_learned.html">a blog post of his own</a>, reflecting the lessons learned in this small experiment: the navigation on that list was poor, he didn't get <em>anything</em> out of it other than some visitors to his page, where he could have been promoting his <a
href="http://twitstat.com/m/">awesome web-based twitterclient Twitstat</a>. 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!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-clients/">The power of Twitter (clients) exposed</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/twitter-clients/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>11</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/197/3161055210_8e00834fd1.jpg?v=0" /> <media:content url="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/197/3161055210_8e00834fd1.jpg?v=0" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Traffic stats on Twitstat.com</media:title> </media:content> </item> <item><title>TwitterCounter: the API and the Mint Pepper</title><link>http://yoast.com/twittercounter-api/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=twittercounter-api</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/twittercounter-api/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:58:08 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Mint]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1296</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>As you know I'm a big fan of TwitterCounter, and Boris, its creator and founder is one of the few Dutch entrepreneurs I'm actually a fan of, as he really seems to get the "new" web. I emailed him last week, asking why TwitterCounter didn't have an API, and we started talking about what an [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twittercounter-api/">TwitterCounter: the API and the Mint Pepper</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img
src="http://twittercounter.com/images/twittercounter.png" alt="TwitterCounter logo" class="alignright" style="background-color: #ddd; padding: 10px;"/>As you know I'm a big fan of TwitterCounter, and Boris, its creator and founder is one of the few Dutch entrepreneurs I'm actually a fan of, as he really seems to get the "new" web.</p><p>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 <a
href="http://twittercounter.com/?inc=api">this API</a>.</p><p>On top of that API Sean Hammons already <a
href="http://getclicky.com/blog/147/keep-tabs-on-your-twitter-followers-from-clicky">implemented a pane for getClicky</a>, and I myself created a Pepper for Mint. It looks like this:</p><p><img
src="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/twittercounter-stats.png" alt="twittercounter stats" width="357" height="226" /></p><p><img
src="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/twittercounter-graph.png" alt="twittercounter graph" width="358" height="363" /></p><p>Like it? Download it <a
href="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/twittercounter-pepper.zip">here</a></p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twittercounter-api/">TwitterCounter: the API and the Mint Pepper</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/twittercounter-api/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>7</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://twittercounter.com/images/twittercounter.png" /> <media:content url="http://twittercounter.com/images/twittercounter.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">TwitterCounter logo</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/twittercounter-stats.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">twittercounter stats</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/twittercounter-graph.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">twittercounter graph</media:title> </media:content> </item> <item><title>Twitter iPhone apps side by side</title><link>http://yoast.com/twitter-iphone-apps/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=twitter-iphone-apps</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/twitter-iphone-apps/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:27:38 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[iPhone]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1284</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>Twitter is now officially a part of my life. I find myself checking Twitter more often then my email, and that, I guess, forces me to be smart about how I use it. I've been using Twitterific and Twinkle side by side for a while, but both annoyed me at times. They look like this: [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-iphone-apps/">Twitter iPhone apps side by side</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/42284674@N00/3039028670" title="View 'Twitter apps side by side' on Flickr.com"><img
src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3005/3039028670_deb153a447_o.png" alt="Twitter apps side by side" width="320" height="90" align="right" /></a>Twitter is now officially a part of my life. I find myself checking Twitter more often then my email, and that, I guess, forces me to be smart about how I use it.</p><p>I've been using <a
href="http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific">Twitterific</a> and <a
href="http://tapulous.com/twinkle/">Twinkle</a> side by side for a while, but both annoyed me at times. They look like this:</p><div
style="margin: 10px auto; width: 350px;"> <a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/42284674@N00/3038165489" title="View 'Twitterific Pro' on Flickr.com"><img
src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3060/3038165489_e4655ca4e6_m.jpg" alt="Twitterific Pro" class="alignleft" width="160" height="240"/></a><a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/42284674@N00/3039002898" title="View 'Twinkle' on Flickr.com"><img
src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3139/3039002898_2e439f64c5_m.jpg" alt="Twinkle" style="margin-left: 10px;" class="alignleft" width="160" height="240"/></a></div><p
style="clear:both;">I was missing the easy to reach replies tab, and found both to be a tad bit slow. I remembered from <a
href="http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-i-use-twitter-at-volume/">this post from Chris Brogan</a> that he used <a
href="http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/">Twittelator</a>, 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:</p><div
style="text-align:center;"> <a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/42284674@N00/3039003080" title="View 'Twittelator Pro' on Flickr.com"><img
src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3203/3039003080_81d3d729a4_m.jpg" alt="Twittelator Pro" border="0" width="160" height="240" /></a></div><p>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.</p><p>Now that I had installed 3 apps already, I thought what the heck, let's try the other ones. I found <a
href="http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFon">Twitterfon</a>, 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:</p><p><a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/42284674@N00/3039002746" title="View 'Twitterfon' on Flickr.com"><div
style="text-align:center;"><img
src="http://static.flickr.com/3289/3039002746_2168b9a766_m.jpg" alt="Twitterfon" border="0" width="" height="" /></div><p></a></p><p>Best thing about it? It's free!</p><p>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!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-iphone-apps/">Twitter iPhone apps side by side</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/twitter-iphone-apps/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>12</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3005/3039028670_deb153a447_o.png" /> <media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3005/3039028670_deb153a447_o.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twitter apps side by side</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3060/3038165489_e4655ca4e6_m.jpg" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twitterific Pro</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3139/3039002898_2e439f64c5_m.jpg" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twinkle</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3203/3039003080_81d3d729a4_m.jpg" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twittelator Pro</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://static.flickr.com/3289/3039002746_2168b9a766_m.jpg" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twitterfon</media:title> </media:content> </item> <item><title>Easily display your last Tweet</title><link>http://yoast.com/display-latest-tweet/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=display-latest-tweet</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/display-latest-tweet/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:13:45 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category> <category><![CDATA[PHP]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://yoast.com/?p=1269</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>I wanted to show my latest tweet on the front page of this site, and although I know there are several plugins which probably could've helped me do this, I decided to see how easy the API was to use. It turned out to be incredibly easy, as long as you have PHP 5.2 or [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/display-latest-tweet/">Easily display your last Tweet</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I wanted to show my latest tweet on the front page of this site, and although I know there are several plugins which probably could've helped me do this, I decided to see how easy the <a
href="http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation">API</a> was to use.</p><p>It turned out to be incredibly easy, as long as you have PHP 5.2 or higher, that is.</p><p>This is the code:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">require_once(ABSPATH . &amp;#x27;wp-includes/class-snoopy.php&amp;#x27;);
$snoopy = new Snoopy;
$snoopy-&amp;gt;fetch(&amp;quot;http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jdevalk.json?count=1&amp;quot;);
$twitterdata = json_decode($snoopy-&amp;gt;results,true);
echo &amp;quot;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;\&amp;quot;&amp;quot;.$twitterdata[0][&amp;quot;text&amp;quot;].&amp;quot;\&amp;quot;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;quot;;</pre><p>As you can see, I use the Snoopy library to fetch the data, as that comes with WordPress by default.  Than I decode the JSON results by using the <code>json_decode</code> function. This is the reason you need PHP 5.2 or up, as this was only included with this version of PHP.</p><p>Next, we output it. Of course, this is a quick &#038; dirty implementation. If I got dugg now, and 1,000 people a minute came looking at that page, it should have some sort of caching in there. For now though, this is fine as it is!</p><p><strong>Update:</strong> As Kim noticed in the comments, I've added some code to automatically link any @username mentions to those usernames. Replace the last echo line above with this:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">$pattern = &amp;#x27;/\@([a-zA-Z]+)/&amp;#x27;;
$replace = &amp;#x27;&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://twitter.com/&amp;#x27;.strtolower(&amp;#x27;\1&amp;#x27;).&amp;#x27;&amp;quot;&amp;gt;@\1&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;#x27;;
$output = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[0][&amp;quot;text&amp;quot;]);
echo &amp;quot;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;\&amp;quot;&amp;quot;.$output.&amp;quot;\&amp;quot;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;quot;;</pre><p>You could even decide to add <code>rel="nofollow"</code> the <code>$replace</code> if you don't want those links to give juice.</p><p><strong>Update 2:</strong> 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:</p><pre lang="php" line="1">require_once(ABSPATH . &#x27;wp-includes/class-snoopy.php&#x27;);
$tweet   = get_option(&quot;lasttweet&quot;);
$url  = &quot;http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jdevalk.json?count=20&quot;;
if ($tweet[&#x27;lastcheck&#x27;] &lt; ( mktime() - 60 ) ) {
  $snoopy = new Snoopy;
  $result = $snoopy-&gt;fetch($url);
  if ($result) {
    $twitterdata   = json_decode($snoopy-&gt;results,true);
    $i = 0;
    while ($twitterdata[$i][&#x27;in_reply_to_user_id&#x27;] != &#x27;&#x27;) {
      $i++;
    }
    $pattern  = &#x27;/\@([a-zA-Z]+)/&#x27;;
    $replace  = &#x27;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/&#x27;.strtolower(&#x27;\1&#x27;).&#x27;&quot;&gt;@\1&lt;/a&gt;&#x27;;
    $output   = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[$i][&quot;text&quot;]);  
    
    $tweet[&#x27;lastcheck&#x27;] = mktime();
    $tweet[&#x27;data&#x27;]    = $output;
    $tweet[&#x27;rawdata&#x27;]  = $twitterdata;
    $tweet[&#x27;followers&#x27;] = $twitterdata[0][&#x27;user&#x27;][&#x27;followers_count&#x27;];
    update_option(&#x27;lasttweet&#x27;,$tweet);
  } else {
    echo &quot;Twitter API not responding.&quot;;
  }
} else {
  $output = $tweet[&#x27;data&#x27;];
}
echo &quot;&lt;p&gt;\&quot;&quot;.$output.&quot;\&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&quot;;[/code]

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

<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;
  &amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://twitter.com/jdevalk&amp;quot;&amp;gt;
    &amp;lt;?=$tweet[&amp;#x27;followers&amp;#x27;]?&amp;gt; followers on Twitter, and you?
  &amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;
&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;</pre><p>Update 3: Another fix to automatically make all links clickable, below this line:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">$output = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[$i][&amp;quot;text&amp;quot;]);</pre><p>Add:</p><pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">$output = make_clickable($output);</pre><p>This will use the WordPress internal <code>make_clickable</code> function to make sure that all URL's are clickable.</p><p>Enjoy!</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/display-latest-tweet/">Easily display your last Tweet</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/display-latest-tweet/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>50</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Twittering with Twitterific</title><link>http://yoast.com/twitter-twitterific/#utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=twitter-twitterific</link> <comments>http://yoast.com/twitter-twitterific/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:00:48 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Joost de Valk</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Usability & Conversion]]></category> <category><![CDATA[iPhone]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://www.joostdevalk.nl/twitter-twitterific/</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p>Note: if you like this post, read my post on Twitter iPhone apps side by side. 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 [...]</p><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-twitterific/">Twittering with Twitterific</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Note: if you like this post, read my post on <a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-iphone-apps/">Twitter iPhone apps side by side</a>.</p><p><img
style="width: 176px; height: 176px; float: right" src="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/twitterific-logo1.png" alt="Twitterific logo" width="176" height="176" />I've been hooked on Twitter for a while now, (I'm <a
href="http://twitter.com/jdevalk">@jdevalk</a>, follow me!) and I use Twitterific mostly when I'm at my Mac. <a
href="http://www.sugarrae.com/">Rae</a> 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).</p><p><span
id="more-589"></span>So here we go:</p><ol><li>Start by downloading <a
href="http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific">Twitterific</a>.</li><li>Unzip the DMG file, and move Twitterific, with the cool icon on the right, to your Applications folder</li><li>Start up Twitterific, add in your Twitter account details, and you'll see a window which looks something like this:</li></ol><p><img
src="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/picture-2.png" alt="Twitterific interface" /></p><p>You can tweak the settings, of which it has quite a few, to change stuff like the refresh speed:</p><p><img
src="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/picture-3.png" alt="Twitterific interface" /></p><p>Now the fun starts, as Twitterific has some great shortcuts:</p><ul><li>âŒ˜R - Refresh list of tweets</li><li>âŒ˜K - Mark all tweets as read</li><li>âŒ˜2 - Reply to the selected tweet (using "@name")</li><li>âŒ˜D - Send a direct message</li><li>âŒ˜â†? - Open the user's Twitter page</li></ul><p>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:</p><ul><li><a
href="http://www.daverohrer.com/twitterfox-review/">A look at Twitterfox</a></li><li><a
href="http://blog.derekville.net/2008/03/28/review-of-the-twhirl-twitter-client/">Twhirl Twitter Client Review</a></li><li><a
href="http://www.seodisco.com/twittertools">TwitterTools: WordPress and Twitter</a></li><li><a
href="http://www.bbgeeks.com/blackberry-applications/complete-guide-to-twitterberry-the-blackberry-app-for-twitter-88266/">TwitterBerry app for BlackBerry and Twitter</a></li><li><a
href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitterfeed/6612/">Twitterfeed Review</a></li><li><a
href="http://dixonjones.com/web-technology/using-netvibes-for-your-smo/">Using Netvibes for Twitter</a></li><li><a
href="http://www.accuracast.com/seo-weekly/twitter-twitbin.php">TwitBin - Microblogging Made Easy</a></li><li><a
href="http://www.themadhat.com/social-media/debauchery-douchebaggary-drunkenness/">The Guide to Being a Drunken, Debaucherous Twit</a></li></ul><p><a
href="http://yoast.com/twitter-twitterific/">Twittering with Twitterific</a> is a post by <a
rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a
href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>.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 <a
href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://yoast.com/twitter-twitterific/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>20</slash:comments> <media:thumbnail url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/twitterific-logo1.png" /> <media:content url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/twitterific-logo1.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twitterific logo</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://cdn2.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/picture-2.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twitterific interface</media:title> </media:content> <media:content url="http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/picture-3.png" medium="image"> <media:title type="html">Twitterific interface</media:title> </media:content> </item> </channel> </rss>
<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Minified using apc
Page Caching using apc
Database Caching 5/14 queries in 0.003 seconds using apc
Object Caching 2509/2542 objects using apc
Content Delivery Network via cdn.yoast.com

Served from: yoast.com @ 2012-05-23 18:05:42 -->
