I just recently became a fan of Twitterfeed. Until now, I was taking the plugin approach to making my blog Tweet but have finally realized that by utilizing Twitterfeed, I can save time, increase load times by decreasing plugins, and not have to worry about whether my stuff got Tweeted or not.

The Beginnings

At first, I was skeptical. I’m a general skeptic and a bit of a pessimist, so my initial assumption was going to be that I didn’t like Twitterfeed. Well, that’s just not true. I’ve come to love it now, and here’s why: Twitterfeed will Tweet, as well as update other networks simultaneously just by parsing your RSS feed. Now, in English, that means that when you publish a new blog entry, your RSS feed gets updated, Twitterfeed sees that update, and Tweets/posts  it. It’s a dead simple idea, and it’s darn near flawless.

The Pros

Using Twitterfeed has a ton of pros. The first of which is it saves you some disk speed and can shave a few seconds off of your overall load time. By not having plugins that do this for you, things can speed up a little bit. Awesome.

Second, when you click on a link from Twitterfeed, there’s a “UTM_Source” and a bunch of other junk attached to the URL to make it a billion miles long. You probably think I’m nuts for liking that, but I do, and here’s why: Analytics. By having the UTM source and other meta-type-data attached to the URL, it allows me to better see where my visitors are coming from. You can do this same type thing in Feedburner (different post, coming soon) too. Your numbers at some point will matter to you and being able to identify your traffic is a good thing, I promise.

The Cons

Sometimes your feed won’t update instantly, especially if you use a 3rd party aggregation tool like Feedburner. If you have your feed being delivered by Feedburner, it can take up to half an hour for your Tweets and updates to appear anywhere. This isn’t so much a problem with Twitterfeed as it is with the amount of time it takes some aggregators to ping your blog.

Second…wait for it…there’s not one.

The End.

Basically, using Twitterfeed rocks. It gives you the ability to eliminate plugins, save disk space, increase load time, and lower your blood pressure by not making you worry. It will work every time unless you have a problem with your feed, which is usually rare for most. It’s great, and I’d openly suggest it to anyone.

In fact, why not head over to Twitterfeed right now, and sign up? What’s holding you back?

What are your thoughts on this? I’d like to see what everyone else is doing out there.

There are tons of ways to alert the world that you’ve updated your blog. There are typically three approached to this: the plugin approach, the manual approach, and then, the least talked about, the feed triggered approach.

Plugins

For the most part, you can find plugins for most blogging platforms that will do most anything. With the flexibility of PHP there isn’t much you can’t do in a plugin. Most bloggers will use a plugin to make their blog Tweet or post to Facebook every time that they post something. This is cool and definitely the most normal way of doing this, but there’s a problem with it. Sometimes plugins break when the core platform upgrades, other times, API updates happen and you have to wait on the plugin developer to update everything…other times the plugin just breaks. There’s also the site speed factor here. The more plugins you have, the longer it can take your site to load.

Manually

Next, there’s the manual approach. This is when you manually alert every darn network that you posted something new. This takes time and consistency. Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking time to do things and being consistent, but seriously, do you really have that kind of time? Do you have time to update Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon that you posted? What if you post multiple times a day? You’d waste so much time alerting everyone that by the time you were done alerting, it would be time for your next post and you’d have to start it all over again. What good is that? None.

Feed Triggered

Lastly, the feed triggered Tweet/post. Wow. This one is cool. It does require some amount of brain power, but it’s not hard. By letting your feeds do the work, you can eliminate plugins and save time by not having to do everything yourself. Currently, I’m using Twitterfeed for my Tweeting/posting to Facebook and it’s awesome. I no longer have to worry about plugin compatibility, I no longer have to take the time to manually Tweet updates (not that I did it very often to begin with; I was a little smarter than that). I simply sit back, relax, and when Feedburner pings my blog (every half hour or when I do it manually) everything gets notified. It’s that simple.

In the end…

When it comes down to it, it’s your choice as to what you want to do and what works best for you. For me, it’s the feed triggered event that makes me the happiest. You may prefer the plugin idea for some reason, and others may just like the idea of posting it yourself to seem more human and to personalize everything a little bit more, and that’s great. I’d suggest you find something that works for you. Alerting such a large community, like Twitter, makes your blog more likely to be read and loved by hundreds if not thousands.

Expect more about Twitterfeed soon!

Let’s face facts for a few minutes. Spam is everywhere. Spammers, spam blogs, spam bots…and even the real SPAM are everywhere. Protecting your blog against spam is important for several reasons: appearance, performance, and security. For those 3 reasons, along with tons more that I won’t cover, you don’t want Akismet, you need it. It’s not an option- seriously.

Akismet is one of the best spam filters available. It’s so awesome, in fact, that IntenseDebate gives its users the option to use Akismet filtering through them. Akismet has one of the largest collections of words and IPs to filter (from my understanding). You don’t need to fully understand Akismet to know that it works. Just know it works 99% of the time.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

I see a lot of blogs these days with 3rd party comment plugins and some of them definitely add some cool functionality, others look cool, and the rest just exist because of the “monkey see, monkey do” ideology- in other words, because people copy things in hopes to make it better.

Since opening T3xtual last summer, I have experimented with both IntenseDebate and more recently Disqus. If you’ve noticed, I’ve disabled them both. “Why?” you ask. It’s simple- page speed.

While 3rd party plugins for commenting are great and while they do offer some awesome spam filtering, I’ve noticed 2 things. First and foremost, most people don’t use the few features those two plugins offer. Video commenting is cool, and so is adding polls, but seriously, who uses them? No one.

My second problem is page speed. Because I’m not on a private server, my bandwidth is shared with others. I wish I knew who, but I don’t. These 3rd party plugins bring with them scripts that are hosted on their servers. Their servers aren’t part of a CDN, nor can you host them locally or on your CDN. This is a problem, especially if you’re counting on front page load times. I cut mine in half just by eliminating the plugins.

It’s interesting to me that neither Intensedebate or Disqus allow you to host their JS files on your server or CDN. Everyone knows that the fewer DNS lookups your site has, the faster it’s going to be. It’s a given. I hope someone reads this and will eventually open that up. It’d make me happy and I’d definitely be willing to re-enable either one of them.

I think this goes for more than just me. I’m seeing more and more (Wordpress based) blogs go back to the built in commenting system. There’s nothing wrong with it and it can be customized just as easily as any other commenting system.

What about you? What does your blog use?

That blue bird is everywhere, and it seems everything and everyone are tweeting their hearts out about everything from waking up to announcing new blog posts and everything in between. I think the Twitter trend is weird, let me explain why.

At first, Twitter was a social tool used to see what people were up to. It was almost a professional thing and we all double checked our tweets before we hit the big button. After time, it was observed that people stopped using their accounts after the first 3o days. Strange.

Now, Twitter is the world’s way of sharing everything, and often too much. I don’t think some people should be allowed those 140 characters to exercise their freedom of speech. I mean, there’s twitter accounts set up to tweet when some guy farts so hard his chair actually shakes! It’s absurd.

My Twitter ride is like the Scream Machine at Six Flags over Georgia. It has its ups and downs. Sometimes I use it merely as a tool to share the fact that I decided to write something. Others, I actually use it to communicate with a few people, and other times I just like to see who’s out there talking about things that I’m interested in.

Right now, I’ve started Tweeting again, at least on my personal account. I can’t guarantee how long it’ll last this time, but it could be a while.

What about you? What do you think about Twitter’s trends? Your trends with Twitter?

Share below.

Last week I talked about how your website performance and file size really does matter. In sum, your site needs to be fast and your file sizes need to be small. It’s that simple. Now comes a few things (those noted in the title) that are a little more advanced, require some knowledge, and patience to fully grasp.

First up: permalinks. Permalinks are permanent links to a certain page, article, or other object. Most blogging platforms and CMSs allow  you to customize your permalink structure. The default usually looks kinda strange and usually has questions marks, numbers, and probably a few = signs in there too. These make about as much sense to a user as they do to a search engine. My point is, “page.php?id=098765567″ or “page.php?name=somethingstupid” don’t make sense to us or to a computer. My other point is you need to make these things readable to both computers and users alike. I see a lot of blogs that have their structure setup like this: “blogname.com/category/post-name” and that’s cool…but it’s often too long, and most people don’t really care about the category anyway. I like (and suggest) the look and functionality of something like “blogname.com/post-name“. It looks nice, and it works! When a search engine sees your site, it can match your search to the permalink structure better.

Another popular form of link is the short link. A lot of bloggers are still using services such as bit.ly or is.gd for their short URLs. While this is nice, I think it’s much cooler to have short URLs on your own domain. That way, you get recognition and people know where they are going when they click your link. When you click a bit.ly or is.gd link, you have no earthly idea where you’re really going. Readers want comfort and to know that they aren’t about to click the link that will crash their computer and put it into an unrepairable state. That’s bad. Give your readers some peace of mind and put your short links on your own domain. There are several ways of doing this, but I’d suggest su.pr and the Su.Pr Plugin for Wordpress.

Next Up: Blogging Better, Blogging Faster: Publicizing with Twitter.

I’m really excited to share a few things with you guys (all four of you).

First off, I was invited to be a beta tester for Human3rror’s (John Saddington)  Standard Theme on my other blog, An Altered Reality. It’s really awesome. The coding is awesome, awesome in form and in comments. The style is clean, crisp, and really awesome! The admin panel is nothing short of mind blowing making the whole experience amazing for both me andyou. I love it. You should definitely check it out. The beta is closed right now, but you can keep checking StandardTheme.com to see if it opens back up.

Second, I’ve been approved as a Technorati writer. I’m not exactly sure how proud to be about it. I don’t know how their approval process really works and I’m not sure if they accept everyone that applies. Whatever the case, I’m going to be writing there as well as here. I’m excited and really wanted to share that.

That’s everything. I’ll be posting part 2 of “Blogging Better, Blogging Faster” within the next few days, followed by part 3. I’m going to try and have those Technorati approved too so I can share with the rest of the blogosphere. I’m excited. I hope you are too (and if not, be excited for me!)