The New (New) Twitter
Twitter recently rolled out a brand new upgrade; their second major upgrade in a very short amount of time.
So what’s new with this new (new) Twitter?
Well, for one the login page looks quite a bit different:
Upon logging in you’ll also notice that your home page looks different as well:
So let’s take a look at this one at a time…
First, we see that our updates have moved to the right of the page instead of as the main portion of the page itself. If you hover over any of the updates on the right you’ll see a few new things:
You can reply, retweet and favorite a post (which all in all is nothing significant) but, here’s something that I really like, there is now an “Open” link which allows you to see the full post.
In this next image, I’ve clicked the open link and can see how many times it had been retweeted as well as the last 7 people to do so.
The @connect button at the top of your feed will show you all of your @ replies.
The #Discover button let’s you discover new content and it’s especially helpful that you can then enter in a hashtag or a keyword to find new topics that interest you.
Twitter has now even introduced Brand Pages – just like Facebook and Google+ have but that’s in a different post.
All in all, Twitter continues to strive to make your experience there more user-friendly and I think with this new update, they’ve done a great job!
What Does the # Sign Mean on Facebook?
Within Facebook you’ll often see the # sign, also called the hash tag, number sign, or the pound symbol. Facebook doesn’t actually have a pound sign feature itself. Instead, what you’re seeing are people who have posted a message on Twitter and at the same time have updated Facebook with this same message.
A great example of how this gets done is by using a free program called HootSuite. Hootsuite allows anyone to update their status on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all at the same time.
If you’re making an update using Hootsuite and you want to make reference to a certain hash tag on Twitter then within your status update you’d use the # symbol. Since you’re also updating LinkedIn and Facebook at the same time, these hash tags simply get carried over to the other social networks.
So just know that whenever you do see that symbol, what you’re seeing is someone who is updating Twitter using a hash tag and has updated Facebook at the same time.
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30 “Must Have” Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Marketing Strategies, Plugins, Productivity, seo, Traffic, twitter, Videos, WordPress
There are 14,865 (and counting) plugins available for you to download and use. But how do you know which ones pack the most punch, which ones are updated often and most of all, which ones will be worth your time.
Below are 30 “Must Have” Plugins for your WordPress blog.
Membership & Engagement
Having a blog just isn’t enough. You need a way to get those readers engaged and these plugins will help you do just that.
- WordPress eMember – this neat little plugin let’s you turn your existing WordPress site into a membership site.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – this plugin will detect all of the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track every last subscriber.
- Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps your readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader they’d like.
- MailChip Widget - This lets your users sign up to your MailChimp mailing list.
Social Networking
We all need ways to engage people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. These plugins will help you do just that.
- Simple Twitter Connect – this plugin makes it easy for your site to use Twitter in a very modular way.
- Facebook Comments for WordPress – let’s your visitors comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (I’m sure you’ve seen this widely used across the web). This also supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts and recent comments.
- Simple Facebook Connect - this makes it easy to use Facebook Connect on your site.
- Share This – a very useful and popular plugin that let’s your site visitors share a post or a page with others. This also supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
- Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
Monetization
We all would like to have the ability to make money from our blog right? These plugins help you do just that.
- AdSense Now! – Simply puts your AdSense code in up to three spots in your posts and pages. Even those that don’t exist yet!
- WP e-Commerce – this is an application that let’s you use a fully featured shopping cart application.
- Awesome Google AdSense – This plugin will automatically insert Google AdSense ads into your posts, pages and sidebar. No more copying and pasting!
- WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – This lets you add an “Add to Cart” button on any post or page. You can also display the shopping cart within the sidebar easily. It shows the user what they have in their cart and lets them remove items if they want to.
Media – Videos, Images and Audio
Many people like to have all kinds of content on their sites; not just text but images, videos and even audio files. These plugins will help you do just that.
- NextGen Gallery - A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.
- FancyBox for WordPress – Integrates FancyBox into your blog and allows you to upload, activate and done. But…you can customize it if you want to.
- All in One Video Pack – Touted as “not just another video embed tool”. Includes all kinds of functionality you may need.
- WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that allows for easy embedding of supported sites. (Currently 65 different video sites).
- Degradable HTML5 audio and video – Use this plugin to embed video and audio on your site using shortcodes. It enables HTML5 native playback for those users who have compatible browsers.
Security
If you run a WordPress blog currently, you know that WordPress updates constantly; usually for security measures. That said, sometimes you can’t get to it quick enough to upgrade so these plugins should help you out.
- LoginLockdown – If someone tries to login to your blog and guess your password, this neat little plugin will detect how many times someone has tried from an IP address and locks it down after a certain number of failed attempts. It even logs the IP address and timestamp of when these attempts occured.
- Akismet – This plugin catches all of those spam comments you receive on a constant basis. Now, that said, it used to be 100% free; and it still is for personal, non-business accounts. But if you have a blog that would be classified as a business site, it’ll now cost you $5 a month. A small price to pay for saving time deleting spammy comments.
- WordPress Database Backup – Creates a backup of your core WordPress database tables as well as any other tables of your choice.
Search Engine Optimization
We all need SEO on our sites, whether that be a blog or not. But, WordPress makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages with a few plugins.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast - “The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog.” With a huge list of features that are far too numerous to mention here.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Creates an XML Sitemap that’s compliant and supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
- SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with their corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – There’s a complete video introduction about this plugin if you visit the link on the left but essentially it does so much more for you than a simple “plug the analytics code into your blog”. See the site for more information.
Speed
In case you missed it, Google is now taking into account site speed when it looks at a site. No one wants to visit a website and have to wait 15 seconds for it to load. These plugins will help you with this issue.
- W3 Total Cache – Used by some well known names such as MattCutts.com, Mashable, and LockerGnome.com, as well as recommended by HostGator, MediaTemple and more, it improves the user experience by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site.
- WP Super Cache – Generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing heavy PHP scripts.
Functionality
Sometimes you just want your blog to do certain things…
- Redirection – Manages 301 redirects, and essentially ties up all those loose ends you may have on your site.
- Exclude Pages – Adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If unchecked, the page will not appear in any listings of pages.
- WP Contact Form – A drop in form for users to contact you. Can be placed on any page or post.
This information was originally posted at ineedhits but I’ve expanded the explanations a little bit to give you a better overview.
Are there any other plugins that you use and recommend? What are they?
