Twitter | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

My Last WordPress.com Post (I Hope)

As I mentioned in Blogging 310, I’m making the switch from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress platform. I appreciate all the suggestions and guidance I’ve received via Twitter and through the post comments. I particularly want to call out Bill Ferriss (@billfer), who also works in the health care Web world. He also runs a blog about the Detroit Tigers, which means I guess that he should be my sworn enemy, since I’m a Minnesota Twins fan. Just goes to show the powerful unifying force of Twitter. 😉

It seems there are a lot of good hosting options available, ranging from shared hosting, in which your space is among several others on the same server, to dedicated hosting, in which you are on your own real or virtual server. The former is generally a few dollars a month, while the latter typically starts at $50 a month and goes up from there. As I mentioned, I’m really cheap, and Bill says shared hosting is probably a good place to start (although he’s outgrown it.)

I had gone to check out options at these various sites, including GoDaddy.com, where I have registered the domain name for SMUG. I also got a good illustration of some smart techniques for upselling customers, when I received this email yesterday:

The folds at GoDaddy know I’m in the market for hosting services because I visited those portions of the site, and they’re giving me an incentive to choose them. Smart business.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Tonight, after I get back from my son’s basketball game against the nearby rival Albert Lea Tigers, I’m going to start the switch. I’ll be tweeting about the process on the @SMUG_U account (please follow if you haven’t already) using the hashtags #smug and #blogmigration, and giving a real-time account of the process. As you follow and get my Tweets (although I know most SMUGgles have better things to do on their Saturday nights) , please feel free to share any pointers.

I’ll also be capturing screenshots and videos for more 300-level Blogging courses. Through Twitter I’ll have time stamps that mark how long each step takes. Hopefully I will be resuming the Twitter curriculum (and the advanced Blogging courses) on Monday on my new GoDaddy server and with a new theme.

Updated 1/5/09: As of this morning, about 35 hours after I activated my GoDaddy hosting account, they still haven’t completed the account set-up. I understand that my purchase at 10 p.m. on Saturday is probably unusual, but GoDaddy advertises itself as a 24/7 provider. I guess setting up is more labor intensive, and I don’t mind them not working Sundays. In fact, I would support that. But when they say it should be done within 24 hours, they should indicate the weekend exception.

@SMUG_U Twitter Profile Lets You Connect with SMUGgles

In addition to the SMUG Twitter Group, I’ve also established a SMUG_U profile in Twitter as a way to enable SMUGgles to connect with each other.

I’ll be logging into it regularly (probably increasingly as we progress), and may use Twitterfeed to automatically publish some links to posts from this blog, but one of the key benefits will be that you can see who else is following @SMUG_U, and you can follow them, too. That will be covered in Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed.

For now, just follow @SMUG_U.

If you’re a smarty pants who wants to skip ahead, you can see who else is following @SMUG_U and follow them.

And as you are tweeting, feel free to use the #smug hashtag if you think the item will interest your fellow SMUGgles.

SMUG Twitter Group

As part of our ongoing exploration of Twitter, I’ve formed a couple of new outposts to explore ways to enable SMUGgles to get to know each other and interact.

The first is a Social Media University, Global (SMUG) Twitter Group, on the TwitterGroups site. The user interface reminds me a bit of Craigslist, and it seemed kind of odd that although I’m the group creator, when I went there today it gave me the “Join Group” option instead of knowing that I am a member.

So, I joined again. Now I’m on the list.

I hope you’ll join too, so we can explore together and see whether this service is worthwhile.

That’s part of the idea of SMUG: Get hands-on experience with social media tools, so you can see whether they make sense for you to use in your own business or non-profit organization.

So if you post tweets about it, use the #smug hashtag, and we’ll see if they get pulled into the group.

I’ll be interested to see what you think!

Twitter 102: Creating an Account

This slidecast is part of the Twitter curriculum at Social Media University, Global. It takes you step-by-step through the process of creating your Twitter account.

Below is a narrated slidecast from slideshare.net. If you like, you can click this link to open another browser window at the Twitter home page, and then come back to this window and start the slidecast. Hit the “pause” button whenever you’d like, and go back to the other window and do your own Twitter signup.

Creating an account in Twitter really isn’t that hard, but if you’re just starting I thought having this step-by-step illustration might be helpful.

Assignments:

Create your Twitter account.
Follow me on these two Twitter accounts, @LeeAase and @SMUG_U. I’ll follow you back. And that will enable us to create a much more interactive community of SMUGgles as we learn about Twitter together.

Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets

In response to this post about how you can put a “Follow Me” Twitter badge on your WordPress.com blog, budgallant says:

that’s interesting, but definitely not at alternative to actually displaying the twitter updates…. what is up with wordpress? do they have a bias against twitter?

It’s not an anti-Twitter thing; it’s about WordPress.com stripping any javascript that you attempt to paste into one of its widgets. They say it’s a security measure, and I’ll take them at their word. I suppose if you have several million blogs on one server domain, you don’t want one with malicious code to bring the whole platform down. So the easy way out is to not allow anything but straight HTML in sidebar widgets.

Thankfully, there is a way around the problem, that lets you both have a badge people can click to follow you, and also display your latest Tweets.

You do the first part by following the instructions I had in the previous post.

Putting the latest Tweets in is actually easier, because Twitter provides an RSS feed that you can pull into an RSS widget in WordPress.com.

Continue reading “Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets”