Have you ever wondered about that pretty subscriber counter most blogs have on their pages? How do they know exactly how many people are following them?

It’s called FeedBurner.  I’ve been using it for a while now and it never occurred to me how much POWER such a service can have! Not only are you provided with statistics, but you can add ads to the feed, get a counter, update twitter automatically, and a whole spectrum of other features.

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this short tutorial:

• getting a FeedBurner Feed
• Setting it up
• incorporating the feed into your website.

Getting a Feed

This is actually the easiest part. All you need is a google account and go here. Once you’re at the dashboard, look over here:

Okay, now go to your blog site. I’m using one of my newer blogs so just type in the URL.

• In my case, I typed in http://www.livingsmartgreen.com/ Click next.
• If you have several RSS feeds available, such as RSS, RSS2, or Atom. Pick one of them. Click next.
• The feed title and address should be already filled in, if not, just type those in. 
• Click next. It should tell you that everything’s done! Click next anyways.
• Check off all the boxes there for extra statistics. Next.

Yay, now you’ve got your feed!

Setting up that feed!

You should be at the main feed page (not the dashboard). Here’s what mine looks like:

Looks good so far. The “analyze” part will not work just yet. You’ll have to wait for that so let’s skip to “publicize” the most important part. Here is the deal, FeedBurner offers A LOT of services, most of which you will never use. Some of them are truly just annoying services so don’t bother. Try them out, and have fun. Here are the essentials:

Go to “PingShot” first and activate it. There are some services that like to get notified whenever your RSS feed changes. This will boost your traffic, hopefully.

Next, go to “socialize” and add your twitter account if you want. Your feed will be reposted on twitter (thus you don’t have to use the WP>twitter WordPress Plugin). Under “hash tags” choose the “Create hashtags….” option. That’s all you need, activate the service and be on your way.

Go to “creative commons” and choose the appropriate license. This makes sure you retain the rights to your content. It’s a smart thing, trust me on this one.

As for the rest:

• Headline Animator creates a banner that shows off your latest feeds as well as a link to your site.
• BuzzBoost does something similar, except it creates a gadget. If you have been following my blog for the past few months, I always had it in the left sidebar under the meta.
• Email subscription. Another nice gadget that lets users subscribe via e-mail rather than RSS. Try it out if you want to.
• FeedCount. Okay, this is everyone’s favorite. This is that little counter thing that tells everyone on your blog how many people are subscribe. If you want it to look fancier, I suggest you use this tutorial to create your own little piece of PHP code and get an actual text value for the number of subscribers. You will probably have to enable the awareness API for this to work.
• Chicklet Chooser. Another nice gadget. This one is used for the actual Feed. If you don’t already have an RSS icon or want to use one of Feedburner’s pre-made icons, go ahead and activate this and customize your own icon. Copy the code, and paste it to your site where you want it.
• Password Protector and NoIndex. Password protector is used if you want to protect your feed from other people. ie. make it private. NoIndex makes sure your feed is not submitted to any search engine (I suggest against it.

That’s pretty much it. If you go to optimize, you will be able to add some new functionality to your feed such as e-mail replies, images, and shortened URL’s. I don’t see the point in that so let’s move on. If you go to monetize, you will be asked to go to google’s AdSense. Log into there if you have an account set up. Go to AdSense Setup and add a Feed. Straightforward setup.

WordPress/Blog Integration

It’s easy to integrate your FeedBurner Feed into WordPress.  Go to Plugins > Add New and serach for “FeedBurner”. Install and activate the plugin called: FD Feedburner Plugin. Moving on, under Plugins, you should find Feedburner Configuration. Go there. Here’s my setup:

I checked off two of those options, you don’t need to. It’s up to you. If you cannot remember the Feed URL, go back to that main page and click on the RSS button. Use that link:

Save the options and you’re done!

What’s the next step?

The next step is optimizing your feed, analyzing the data, and doing whatever. There are a lot of choices to make and a lot of features you can take advantage of. Just have fun and see what you can accomplish!

WP to Twitter | Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design.

I’ve just discovered the craziest, awesomest plugin for WordPress. This little fella allows your WP blog to automatically update your Twitter with the the blog title, a shortlink URL (cli.gs or bit.ly), and even an excerpt!

It has a lot of customizable options, so you can do a ton of things with it. You can use the custom fields in your blog (they’re under the posting options when you’re writing your post) and add them there. One great thing is that there’s an option which lets this plugin add all of the tags you add to the post, as hashtags.

For those of you not literate with twitter a hashtag is a sort of tag that you’d normally use on your blog posts, deviantart submissions (for you crazy art people), and other places. It is preceded by a hash (#) and followed by the tag word. Look at the trends, most of them are hashtags. It makes searching twitter much easier.

Anyways, here’s what’s happening. The sample twitter update should read something like this:

New Post: WP to Twitter Plugin (http://bit.ly/whatever) #twitter #web #social #etc

I think that’s reasonable, no? You can, of course customize this! EVEN FOR SEPARATE AUTHORS AND THEIR RESPECTIVE TWITTER ACCOUNTS!

Anyways Enjoy!

P.S. It also notifies you if the tweet could not be update and saves all options just in case you want to re-tweet

Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://www.davepcguy.com/archive/wp-to%c2%a0twitter-plugin/feed/ 1 http://www.davepcguy.com/archive/twitter-on-wordpress/ http://www.davepcguy.com/archive/twitter-on-wordpress/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:24:50 +0000 Admin http://www.davepcguy.com/?p=589

This morning I went to the rent-a-coder website and found a guy who actually had a project open that asked for twitter integration on WordPress. Naturally, I bid but unfortunately did not win the bid (I’ve just registered, you see) but the guy paid $10 nevertheless. So here is a short tutorial that will save you $10 or about fifteen minutes on google.

Let’s start with the easy stuff:

Twitter Updates

Plugins

1. Let’s add a twitter widget to your sidebar. Go to the plugins section of you WordPress menu on the left. Click on add new. Search for “Wickett Twitter Widget” and click on install on the right. There are lots of twitter plugins and I cannot start reviewing them all because there are so many. I just use this one because I got it first. If you’re having problem installing the plugin, consult the wordpress guide. Once you click install, the plugin should download to your wordpress directory and activate.

Twitter Widget

2. Next go to appearance > widgets. Drag the twitter rectangle from the left where it says “available widgets” to the right where it should say “sidebar”. The picture on the left should come up. Type in the title, such as “My Twitter Updates”, then your twitter account name which is the twitter.com/accountname. In my case “WAjanusdesigns”. You can set the maximum number of tweets from just one up to twenty. You can also hide replies. At the end, you can customize the text between your tweet and timestamp. Here’s an example:

“I just finished a new #CSS #tutorial, go check davepcguy.com and read it!” Alexander said 20h ago.

If you don’t want the widget anymore, simply remove it. Go to plugins > installed, and deactivate the plugin, and then you can delete it.

“Twitter THIS!”

I love those “twitter this” buttons on the bottom of almost all blogs on the internet. Well, let’s go one step further, let’s install a plugin that can “stumble this”, “facebook this”, and support tens of other websites. By far, there is one plugin that basically EVERYONE knows. It’s called “sociable”. Go to plugins > add new and type in “sociable” and it should be the first plugin to come up. Install it real quick and go down to settings > Sociable. Here’s what you’ll see:

Sociable

So above, you can you click off all the different sites you want at the end of every post you make. All of them are pre-formatted in the “twitter this!” kind of way. Try it out at the end of this post and you’ll see what I mean. You can also choose to add the “print” button as well as the “e-mail” button.
Scroll down and check out the rest of the features.

share this

Ignore the first two features, I don’t even know what they mean. The “tagline” is equivalent to the “Share and Enjoy” in the picture above. You can change it to anything else you wish to. “Position” gives you the option to customize where the above bar will show up. It can show up only at the front page, individual pages, every blog post (my choice). Next is CSS and Text Links. Leave CSS checked and text links unchecked. “Text Links” will disable images. You can switch out and use your favorite icons under “image directory”. Next you can use a “thickbox” or an “iframe”, just set the width and height. Next you can choose if the links will open new windows or just redirect the reader to the page. I’d rather the links open new windows so I left that checked. The next two options are completely up to you. Don’t forget to rate them!

Conclusion

And that’s it! Now your blog is completely integrated with twitter! There are hundreds more plugins and all offer you different features. Most though, offer you the basic features of the above plugins. If you want more from twitter, scout around and see what you can find. If you follow some of the people I do on twitter, they frequently post links to new and better twitter plugins.
I hope you enjoyed my short article! Don’t forget to try out my sociable bar right below !

Here’s the first part of my “Setting Up” tutorials. It will teach you how to set up to learn PHP, and for web development. It is my own personally journey as well because I’m getting ready to make new WordPress themes. I’m using Windows XP, soon will be upgrading to Windows 7 (when it comes out) so most of my tutorials will be Windows-oriented.

Installing the Server Software

The best way to learn PHP and scripting is at home and without buying a domain nor paying for hosting. So let’s set up your computer as a server using XAMPP. XAMPP stands for X (as in a variable instead of an OS name) Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PERL. You can use any other alternative depending on your operating system. There’s also WAMP for Windows (I use this one) and MAMP for Mac. All are basically the same with small differences. I’ll show you how to use XAMPP because it’s the most cross-platform package. I’ll do an article on how to set up your Linux with XAMPP later.

So what are these packages? They install the Apache Server, MySQL database system, and PHP all in one. The packages are all set-up to interact and will save you a ton of time. You won’t have to install each program separately and try to intertwine them. It will all be done for you. Go to the XAMPP website, select Windows and download the newest package available. Don’t get distracted by the add-ons.

Depending on the package that you downloaded, you’ll either have an executable file or an archive (zip). I downloaded the .exe for my windows because it was forty megs lighter and easier to set-up. Let’s move on. If you downloaded the .exe file, open it and install it in a folder. When choosing a destination folder, I recommend using your main drive (usually C:\) and a subfolder. I’m installing my XAMPP package into C:\server\, click install, follow the directions and you’re done. If you used the .zip download, extract all of the contents into a folder (C:\server\ for me) and follow the read me which tells you to use a couple .bat files to set-up everything. Once you’re done, start up the XAMPP Control Panel (it will be under start>programs>Xampp for Windows> Xampp Control Panel). If you’re having problems with the Control Panel, start the MySQL and Apache services by double-clicking on apache_start.bat and mysql_start.bat in the main folder.

Here’s what the control panel looks like, it will list a different Windows version etc. but that’s alright:

You can start up all the services shown by just clicking on start. I had some problem with it so I used the .bat files instead. Now point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1/ and you’ll see a XAMPP splash page, pick the language and let’s get going. I’ll cover all the features of XAMPP later tutorials, so for now, be happy that it works

Keep your browser there and read on. Put all your PHP files and other files in …/xampp/htdocs/yourfoldername/ I set mine up /xampp/htdocs/learningPHP and I put an index.php file in there that will link me to all my scripts and tutorials that I absolved (ie. <a href=”tutorial1.php”>tutorial one</a>). This will keep your folders organized and it’ll be easier to find these files. Type in http://127.0.0.1/learningPHP and you’ll get to your index.php file there. Unlike WAMP, XAMPP doesn’t seem to have a listing directory on its server but don’t worry too much about that. We’re set-up and ready to go. If you didn’t get any of this, don’t worry about it. Just remember to make a new folder in /htdocs/ where you can store your php scripts and other stuff. Also, remember that unless you set up your apache and mysql as services (the process is in the readme file and included in the .exe installation), you’ll have to start them every time you start up your computer.
To get rid of XAMPP, simply delete the folder or use the provided “uninstall_xampp.bat” file

Setting up the Database

While in your browser is at http://127.0.0.1/xampp/ Click on PHPmyadmin and follow these directions.

1. click on the “privileges” tab
2. add a new user
3. type in your user name, I’ll use the user name “Alexander”
4. under the host tab, click “local” and it’ll fill out localhost in the field next to it
5. type in a password, I’ll use “davepcguy”
6. Database for user: none
7. check all privileges (it’s the easiest and as long as you don’t put your server online, it’ll be safe)
8. click “Go”
9. go back to “Databases”
10. under Create New Database, create one, I created “WP” for my WordPress

Now I have a database named “WP” under the username “Alexander” with the password “davepcguy”

Your database list should look like this:

The first five databases are preset, and my “wp” database is the one I made.

Setting up WordPress:

First, go download WordPress.

then:

1. extract the zip file into htdocs
2. change “wp-config-sample.php” to “wp-config.php”
3. open the file with your PHP editor. You can also use your text editor if you don’t have a PHP editor yet. I’ll post a short tutorial on setting up your PHP editor later.
4. find this section:

    // ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
   /** The name of the database for WordPress */
   define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
   
   /** MySQL database username */
   define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
   
   /** MySQL database password */
   define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');
   
   /** MySQL hostname */
   define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
   
   /** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
   define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

5. Change “putyourdbnamehere” to the database name you created, in my case it would be “wp”
6. Change “usernamehere” to the username we set up earlier, in my case that would be “Alexander”
7. Change “yourpasswordhere” to your password we set earlier, in my case it would be “davepcguy”
8. save the file and your result should look like this:

   // ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
   /** The name of the database for WordPress */
   define('DB_NAME', 'wp');
   
   /** MySQL database username */
   define('DB_USER', 'Alexander');
   
   /** MySQL database password */
   define('DB_PASSWORD', 'davepcguy');
   
   /** MySQL hostname */
   define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

9. go to: http://127.0.0.1/wordpress

Now let’s install WordPress. Type in the blog title and your e-mail. Press “install”. It will give you a randomly generated password. Copy that password and click “Log in”. Type “Admin” as user name and paste the password. Viola, you got your own home WordPress blog set up!

A couple of tips:

• go change your password immediately, there should be a link on top of the page to do that
• your wordpress password and your MySQL password are NOT the same
• you can always change your e-mail and password under Users>your profile
• before you start posting blog-posts, change your nickname from “admin” to something else
• to log in next time, go back to “http://127.0.0.1/wordpress” and find the login button at the bottom of the right sidebar

That’s all you need to start messing around with PHP and WordPress for now. Have fun figuring out WordPress, I’ll have a tutorial ready later to explain how to use its functions fully but you probably won’t need that. Also, note that this set-up is for home use only. I’d suggest a better username and password if you were to host your blog online. Setting up a WordPress blog online is a bit different, there is no “phpmyadmin” and you’ll have to create a database differently, and probably using software your host provides. Enjoy!