October, 2008 | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

RAQ: Adding a Twitter Badge on WordPress.com

This wasn’t so much a question as it was an expression of dismay from a Twitterbud I met at the Ragan/SAS conference last week. Dave tweeted thusly:

The only significant disadvantage of hosting a blog on WordPress.com is that javascript-based widgets that you can easily insert in Blogger or Typepad don’t work. The Automattic guys only allow HTML, not java, in widgets because they don’t want to take the risk of malicious code being used to hack their 4.4 million-blog fortress.

So when Dave lamented this feature, I Tweeted back that he could work around it as I had in my sidebar widget.

Then I took a look at my sidebar and realized that I had just a plain old text link that said:

Follow Lee Aase on Twitter

And I resolved to fix it so Dave and other SMUGgles could do likewise, and have something more like this, that people can click and go to my Twitter profile:

So how do you do it?

Go to your WordPress.com blog’s dashboard. Choose “Design” and then “Widgets”

Then, from the column of available widgets on the left, click “Add” next to the Text widget:

When the widget is added to the bottom of the right-hand column, click the Edit link:

And then paste the following text into the body of the widget (substituting your name and your Twitter profile URL for mine, of course):

Then click the “Change” button

And “Save Changes”…

And when you go to the front page of your blog, you should see the sidebar look something like this (I combined Technorati and Twitter into one widget):

Updated 12/22/08: In response to a comment below, go here to see how you can have your latest Tweets show up in your sidebar.

Let This Be A Lesson to You

My nephew Tom recently learned the cost of gambling, and especially of impulsive statements.

On the way to his 8th grade football game, a running back teammate said “If I don’t score at least two touchdowns, I’ll get a Mohawk.”

Tom’s reply? “Hey, if you score FOUR touchdowns I’LL get a Mohawk!”

At least it should grow out by basketball season.

Her Last High School Volleyball Game?

My daughter Rebekah and her team are in the second round of the Section 1AAA volleyball tournament tonight vs. Rochester Mayo. The high school, not the Clinic.

The Austin girls are 15-9 on the year and seeded 6th. They are underdogs tonight and in any remaining matches this year, but they had a close loss (3-2) to Mayo last time.

We hope they play again on Wednesday, but we’re proud of Bekah and her teammates. And we have the whole gang of her siblings (at least the ones still at home) here with Lisa and me to cheer them on.

Update: The girls played hard tonight. They lost the first game and then came back to tie the match at 1-1 before losing the next two. There were tears all around as the seniors’ high school volleyball careers came to an end, but we also got some good news that Bekah and her teammate Jolene were nominated to play in a state all-star game in November.

And at least we still have basketball season coming!

Blogging 305: Domain Mapping

Domain mapping enables you to choose any available URL for your blog, regardless of the physical server you use to host your blog.

So, for instance, I started this blog at leeaase.wordpress.com, but when I decided to convert from a blog to a virtual university I mapped it to https://www.social-media-university-global.org/ (because getting the .edu domain would have been too much of a hassle.)

You’ll note that if you click either of the links above, it will take you to the front page of this blog. The purpose of this course is to show you how you can do something similar for your blog that is hosted on wordpress.com, and how that gives you and your blog room to grow for the future.

Here’s the slideshow that takes you through the process, step by step:

The example I used for the demonstration is a blog I helped my septuagenarian parents and their friends start for their local Republican party volunteers to have a means of expression. It was originally at sixissues.wordpress.com and now is mapped to sixbigissues.com.

If you have started a blog on wordpress.com and would like to get wordpress.com out of your blog’s URL, this is how you do it. For businesses and organizations, it’s an important way to have your URL reflect your brand. Either way, if you think you might just get serious about blogging and want to protect your ability to move your blog to a different server where you would have more flexibility and control, spending the $19.19 for a domain and mapping is a good investment.

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New York Times: “Junk” or Barely Above

This is an assessment of its creditworthiness, not the trustworthiness of its political campaign coverage, but note this report:

The New York Times Co. reported a steep drop in third-quarter profits on Thursday, the latest gloomy earnings report in an industry battered by online competition and falling print advertising revenue.
The New York Times Co. said net profit fell by 51.4 percent in the third quarter to 6.5 million dollars, or five cents per share, from 13.4 million dollars, or nine cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

The company, which owns About.com, The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and 16 other daily newspapers besides the flagship The New York Times, said overall advertising revenue fell by 14.4 percent during the quarter.

Shortly after the release of its results, Standard & Poors said it was lowering the Times’s credit rating to “BB-,” or junk status, while Moody’s Investors Service said it was placing it on review for possible downgrade.

Moody’s changed the rating outlook for the company to negative from stable in July. A further downgrade would reduce it to junk status. Both companies said the moves were based on the uncertain outlook for newspaper advertising.

Clearly the current economic situation has potential advertisers conserving cash, which increases the pressure on traditional media companies like the Times Co. But this is just a flare-up in a chronic disease: as I’ve previously noted (here, here, here, here, here, here and here), the big story about big media for the last decade has been gradual decline.

Month: October 2008