S.S. Intrepid

Search Plugin for Open Site Explorer

Yahoo has announced they are shutting down one of the old and beloved SEO tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, later this year.

Yahoo recommends that webmasters sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools and use that as Yahoo shuts off Site Explorer.

Yahoo makes it sound like that you won’t miss the old Site Explorer but I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will provide detailed link data for competitors. Of course there are plenty of third party tools to get at this data, such as Majestic SEO and SEOmoz but with the loss of Site Explorer, there will likely be no search engine-provided look at your back links.

source: Search Engine Land

I’m a fan of Yahoo Site Explorer and will miss it as a link intelligence tool. Back in 2006, I released a search plugin for Yahoo Site Explorer. With its demise just around the corner, I put together an OpenSearch plugin for Open Site Explorer (SEOmoz). You can install it from the Mycroft website or right here. Enjoy!

How to Create a Facebook Profile Picture That Automatically Crops for the Perfect Thumbnail

Have you ever provided a client with a graphic for their Facebook Profile Picture with the hope that they’d figure out how to crop it properly to create a nicely branded thumbnail? Well, if you create a graphic to the right specs, Facebook’s auto-cropping will create the perfect thumbnail image.

These two blog posts provide some good detail about creating Profile Pictures with thumbnails in mind, but through trial and error I found the information to be out of date:

• Making the most of your Facebook page profile picture
• How to Size your Facebook Profile Picture & Thumbnail

If you’re creating a Profile Picture in the current maximum size of 180x540, then you can use this template. Simply ensure that your desired imagery for the thumbnail is included in the specified thumbnail area. When your client uploads the image to their Profile or Page, they won’t need to tweak the thumbnail in any way.

How to Post Daily Delicious Links to Tumblr

Importing a Delicious RSS feed to Tumblr will create a post for every new link you bookmark. To import those links in a single daily post, some extra steps are required.

Delicious > WordPress.com > Tumblr

Delicious Blog Posting

Delicious has an experimental feature called Blog Posting that creates a daily post of your latest bookmarks to your blog. It supports Movable Type, Typepad, Wordpress, and other kinds of blog software. Unfortunately, Tumblr is not one of them, so I’m using WordPress.com as an intermediary.

In Delicious, click Add a new blog posting job.

The out_url for WordPress.com is yourblogsubdomain.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php.

To locate your WordPress.com out_blog_id, click Users > Personal Settings. Look at the source code for the page and locate the Primary Blog drop down code. The option value is your out_blog_id.

<select name="primary_blog"><option value="your_out_blog_id_#" selected="selected">

Now your Delicious links will be published in a daily post to your WordPress.com blog. To publish the daily link posts to Tumblr, simply import your WordPress.com feed to Tumblr (via Customize > Services > Automatically import my… RSS Feed as Links with Summaries.)

Hopefully Delicious will allow for more customization with the Blog Posting feature. In particular, I’d like to be able to use wildcard tags to craft better titles and URLs for the daily posts.

Mobile Plugins for WordPress

I’m working on setting up a mobile edition of a WordPress site. The no frills approach would be to simply create a separate stylesheet for handheld devices, but I could probably spend days tweaking that. Surely a mobile plugin for WordPress would yield faster and more featured results.

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4 Truths About Social Media That You Don’t Want to Forget

Cleaning off my desk today, I came across a page of notes from last month’s Awareness webinar with David Alston of Radian6, Are you answering the “social phone”? Here are some of my favorite scrawls:

a brand is the sum of all conversations

with traditional media, you’re just renting eyeballs

community = asset

it’s not eyes and ears, it’s hearts and minds

Marketing wisdom indeed. This is the kind of stuff that you put on your fridge with magnets, or on Post-Its around the office. It’s the kind of stuff you don’t want to forget.

CommentLuv Blogs Are Doomed

Am I the only one who thinks the CommentLuv plugin for WordPress is nothing more than glorified link building with major potential for abuse and spam?

CommentLuv provides additional functionality to the comment system on your WordPress blog. More specifically, CommentLuv automatically fetches a selection of a commentator’s latest blog posts, tweets or diggs that they can choose from to include at the end of their comment as a link. This provides backlinks to the commentator’s content.

I’ve read a lot of blog posts that sing the praises of CommentLuv but I don’t believe it’s a smart plugin for the long haul because of the potential for Google penalties.

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Annotating Items in Google Reader

While doing some reading/listening for a social media marketing campaign yesterday, I thought to myself:

Wouldn’t it be nice if… Google Reader enabled private notes on items?

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3 Reasons why publishing your Facebook status to Twitter is problematic

Social media marketing can be very time consuming, and automated tools are welcome in just about any marketer’s toolbox. It’s very crucial however to select the right tasks to automate. Twitter automated DMs are an example of problematic automation. So is publishing your Facebook status updates to Twitter.

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One-click bulk follow for Twitter Lists

The new Twitter Lists feature has probably been rolled out to everyone by now. More than just another social media popularity contest, Twitter Lists reveal topic-based influence, pointing you in the direction of the best people to follow for a given topic.

Lists function slightly differently from what I was expecting. They’re more like groups: tweets made by list members are not displayed in your home feed. Instead they’re grouped together and made accessible via the list link in the sidebar. You can follow a List without actually following its members.

A feature I was hoping for with Twitter Lists was the ability to bulk-follow list members with a single click. While this isn’t available via Twitter, it is through TweepML.

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Tips for running Twitter contests

Twitter contests can offer numerous benefits including increased exposure through tweets and retweets (viral), and demonstrating a fun side of your brand (ex. scavenger hunts, uniquely interactive contests.)

Designing an effective Twitter contest is not without its challenges. Consider this: If you’re running a “1st person to answer” type of contest, how will you judge when the tweets actually arrived, by timestamp? How will you track responses and pick a winner?

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