Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

SMUG Reading List 10/27/08

Some helpful recent readings on social media from other sites:

  • Now you can link to a specific spot within a YouTube video. So if you find an interesting spot in a YouTube video that you want to share, you can direct people to that portion instead of making them watch the whol thing (or saying something like “scroll ahead to the 1:45 mark.”) Learn how and see an example of deep linking on  YouTube courtesy of TechCrunch.
  • Wikipatterns has interesting thoughts on how to spur adoption of wikis in your organization (and how to eliminate barriers to adoption.)
  • TwitThis is “The new ‘share this’ for Twitter.” You can drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar, and then easily share whatever page you’re currently viewing through Twitter.
  • And Brian Solis has a helpful post cataloging the Twitter tools (including TwitThis) that are available to make Twitter even more useful for community and communications professionals.

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:

Follow Lee Aase on Twitter

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):

<a href=”http://twitter.com/LeeAase“><img src=”http://assets1.twitter.com/images/twitter_logo_s.png” alt=”Follow Lee Aase on Twitter” /></a>

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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