Rooturaj's Blog

You are all familiar with the the Twitter Bird and the Twitter Whale. They are all over the place. Internet is flooding with the twitter bird variants.

Have you ever seen the twitter Cat. Yeah they have a Cat not. The Techie Cat. When ever their Technology fails the Techie cat comes up. Today Twitters list membership page was down. I was slightly amazed to see the new twitter star and did not mind the technology outage.

So how do you like it?  Like all cats you forget to be annoyed with twitter for letting you down once more. Ha ha.

Twitter's Techie Cat

I guess the thesis theme is among the most popular wordpress themes among professional bloggers. The best part about the theme is its ability to support custom functions and styles. So virtually everything is possible.

After I tried my hands at Thesis theme for WordPress I added some plugins. I need not explain to you the merits of social media sharing buttons. The hottest in this section are Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Especially the share buttons with the counter are must haves for any blog. You get the code to add these buttons from the official portals. There are plugins to achieve the same. But it’s hard to get all three of them or two of them next to each other using different plugins. The example is right on this post.

If you need to have some thing like this on your blog, then follow this simple guide. I have put in screenshots to help you in process. We will be tinkering around with the coding. So some hands on experience with PHP and HTML is welcome. Else you can follow the coding exactly as it is and hope for the best.

Most popular and accurate Re-Tweet button with count comes from tweetmeme. They have a wordpress plugin for that. I am going to add official Facebook and digg share buttons with share count display to the tweetmeme plugin. In this example I am messing with Thesis wordpress theme. You can do the same to any theme you want. It only changes the code of the plugin so – a theme independent solution.

Browsing to the Tweetmeme.php file in wordpress

I believe you have a self hosted wordpress blog.

>>So navigate to the wp-content folder.

>> >>Find the plugins folder. Enter

>> >> >>Find the TweetMeme folder. Enter

>> >> >> >> locate this file tweetmeme.php

Now we tinker with the code. To do so, download the file to local system and open is with some standard text editor. I am using dreamweaver. Now look for this function in the code ‘tm_generate_button()’. Use the find feature in your text editor (ctrl +f ) to find this function. The code is rather long so might be hard to do it manually.

Editing the code

The red bordered area is where we do the actual change. You will have something different in the original file. Now add this code to the $button variable so that the final code looks like above.

<br><br><script>var fbShare = {size: \’large\’,google_analytics: \’true\’}</script><script src=”http://widgets.fbshare.me/files/fbshare.js”></script>
<br><br>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
digg_url = \”.$url.’\';digg_title = “TITLE”;

</script>
<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> </div>

Replace the file and enjoy. Download this php file right here if it is too much for you.

You can do your own modifications to suit your purpose. Replace the <br> with spaces to get a horizontal effect. Feel free to comment.

I reported about the latest Facebook @mentions on Mashyep yesterday. Once I started using it some of my friends started to inquire how I do it and what good does it do. So now, I am putting it to a little more text so that things become a little clearer to those who are not used to this.

If you are a twitter user you would know what are @mentions. When you put @ before any twitter username it gets replaced by a link to the particular user’s profile. This way it helps spread your network. For example ..
“You should follow @rooturaj for some latest Social Media updates.”

Now any one who is following your updates (friends and connections) will know that this bloke, rooturaj, deals with Social Media. So if they are interested they might add me to their list too. Great isn’t it.

Now that was limited to twitter. But starting from 15th Sep Facebook has rolled out a similar feature. When you @mention your friends in your status updates those who are mentioned get a wall update about your status. That is your status update will appear on their wall. You may also link to Groups and Fan pages on Facebook using the same @ symbols.

All is good, but how to do it?
This again is pretty simple. Use the visual guide below.

facebook-mention-friends

As you start typing your friend’s name facebook gives you a suggestion box to choose form. Thats not just the Friend’s name, you can even mention Pages and groups with the same trick.

Now that you know how to do it, its time to surprise some friends. Enjoy.

Update : Feb 2011
You can now mention your friends as facebook links in the comments. More awesome.

If you have more than 200 followers on twitter who tweet regularly then I am sure it would be a herculean task for you to keep track of your friends tweets. Assuming every friend posts only 5 tweets a day that a whooping 1000 tweets per day. If you are not virtually living on twitter all the time tracking these status updates would a very difficult. Particularly when you are highly interested in the updates from a close circle of friends or technology experts. You cannot keep expanding the time line for ever to trace those tweets. This is where we need features like the friends list option on FaceBook.

If you are not a FaceBook fan then let me tell you it is a feature where you can choose a smaller group of friends and assign them a name. So next time you want updates of this particular group then selecting the same will hide all other updates form your other friends who do not belong to this group/list. Pretty easy to keep track of things. Easy to separate business relation from family. Easy to separate local friends form international contacts. You could even have a list of “hot babes” and “kool dudes”. Take a look at my Facebook wall below. To the left you can see some lists highlighted with red arrows.

Friend lists on FaceBook

But this is only on Facebook. How much do I wish a similar feature be provided by Twitter!! It would make things a hell more easier to manage. And this is why I say – “Twitter should provide Tweet Flocks like Facebook List“