TJ Crawford's Abstract Ideas

So we are doing some pretty cool sites as of late and one of them is for Twelve Horses friend Mark Wayman. You can see his current site here but it will be redesigned in January.

So Kenzer (my social tech thermometer) turned me on to Utterz.com. This is a pretty cool service that at first glance is cool but not super functional. Basically you can call into a number (712-432-6666), talk and the audio gets posted to Utterz. Of course there are widgets, flash and links that can be posted/integrated into any site for content distribution (see my right hand sidebar). That alone only makes it slightly cool, but not powerful. However there are a few other options that i found out about after reading a little more.

You can also send an email with text a picture or video attached and it will post just as well. This is powerful not from your computer email but from your mobile phone. You have to be able to send an email from your phone (if you can’t get with the times). Simply shoot the picture or video and email it to go@utterz.com. The Subject line becomes the title and the body of the message is transfered over too. When you hit play an automated voice reads the body of the message. You can use a widget for the sidebars or auto post to your blog through a simple authentication process. Just give it your username, password and the url of your Blooger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter or WordPress site and your golden. Pretty cool.

Now for the not so cool. The widgets or embeds are all flash driven and thus not searchable/indexable for SEO/SEM purposes. There is no text message version for the people who don’t have email setup on their phones. Also the search to find other utterz users is not as effective as you would want.

Overall though a great service and i can’t wait for some community adoption to solve some of the shortfalls.

So one of the kids picked up some styling gel and it made me think about the message marketers send, without really thinking things through. This bottle has a label that says "80% MORE FREE". I realize they were trying to tell us how great a deal it was but really. The 10% or 20% more that I have seen on other products is palatable but 80%? That means whoever bought this product before was getting 20% of the volume and paying the same price.

Translation – We were REALLY ripping you off before.

So for my job I was working with Josh Kenzer on the plugins we have found and what would bring our clients the most value for their WordPress install. I have included a list of the ones we came up with along with a short description of why it’s cool and a link to an example or screen shot. Some were listed in a post last week but I think they definitely warranted an update/explanation.

• Crossroads – Same thing as the above plugin except for your Flickr photos. Example of 3-4 Sets being pulled in. Also uses the the WP Lightbox plugin below to do some pretty cool transitions.
• FCK Editor - I know HTML pretty well but this WYSIWYG makes it super easy. Very much like word and doesn’t take much to train someone how to use.
  
• Google XML Sitemaps – Great plugin that will build XML sitemap for your blog and send it to Google, Yahoo & Ask.com. Tons of specialized configurations for even the pickiest expert.
• TubePress – This plugin lets you display videos or playlists on any page or sidebar. Here is an example of a playlist being pulled in. uses WP Lightbox to produce some cool transitions.
• TwitterTools – This one is a little cooler than I first thought. it is widget ready so it can be placed just about anywhere within a compatible theme. There are some great configurations that let you create a post or daily digest from your tweets, tie the tweets to a category, place your tweets in the sidebar and configure the number of tweets for display. It also gives you the ability to write a tweet from within WordPress (character count and all). For an example just check out my right hand sidebar. Configured to show the last 3 posts within this widget.
• WordPress Reports – Lets you tap into your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts and view a stats dashboard from within WordPress. it’s super simple to get this up and running. Setup a Google analytics or Feedburner account and just give WordPress your user and pass for Google and the url of your rss feed for Feedburner. A nifty little feature for Google is that with a few check boxes this app will install the google tracking code, track outbound links and will exclude your traffic as long as your logged in as an admin.
  
• WP lightbox 2 The YouTube and Flickr plugins use another plugin that does the pop-up and transitions

So it was Blog update night (and morning). I went in to update a theme and ended up compiling my blogroll, updating several plugins and changing my Twitter widget from a Flash based on to an HTML and Javascript version for improved search and find-ability. I did give myself a scare when i updated my Akismet plug-in because I just overwrote the current plugin folder. Not so good an idea. It totally broke the backend and front end with a PHP error. Noooooooo. Easily enough fixed though. I edited the Akismet.php file and hard coded my wordpress API key. Crisis averted.

I had someone ask me about a plugin I used so I’ll take the liberty and list all of them and give some credit to some great developers.

I made some updates to my blogroll on the right side. I added a few blogs and some links to a Flicker group I created. Check them out!

Awesome day up at Heavenly Ski Resort wathing the practice rounds for the Transworld Snowboarding Tour. It was a fantastic Spring day and I was supprised at how much snow was still up there.

here are the photos from the Transworld Snowboarding Tour heald at Heavenly.