WordPress and Twitter

One of the problems many people come across after joining Twitter is they don’t really know what to tweet.

We are all different and use Twitter for a variety of reasons but lack of stuff to tweet should never really be an issue. The web is full of stuff and is constantly being updated.

You can get stuff from news websites, You Tube etc but one good site you may want to consider is http://www.stufftotweet.com. The site has collated popular stories from a variety of categories so posting something of interest is always a good way to start a conversation.

Earlier today I was trying to add a new RSS feed to autopost to a blog using the current version FeedWordPress plugin (v 0707) in Wordpress 2.8.1

For some reason, it would not fetch the text of the post correctly. It was only retrieved a capital ‘A’. I did notice that the encoding was also showing as ‘unknown’ instead of ‘UTF-8′.

Its take a while but I’ve finally got the problem fixed and if you are having the same problem then this is what you do:

1. Go to the plugin home page – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/ and download the ‘development’ version of the plugin (currently v 0713).

2. Upload the plugin to your site.

3. In addition, I had to manually move the file rss.php from the feedwordpress/MagpieRSS-upgrade directory to the wp-includes directory due to my file permissions stopping the auto update.

Thats it. I’ve tested this on a couple of blogs and it seems to work fine.

Depending on your FeedWordPress settings, you may need to refresh the current posts on your blog as mine had all been messed up.

I’m not really sure where the problem lay. Possible, when I upgraded from WP 2.8 to 2.8.1, the FeedWordPress plugin had a bug.

According to the FeedWordPress site, there should be a new version of the plugin out at the start of August.

Continuing on from last week where I decided to put my #followfriday recommendations on this blog, here goes for this week. I’ve picked these from the people who have caught my eye over the last 7 days.

http://www.twitter.com/BritishMonarchy

The Royal Family have just entered the world of Twitter. Don’t expect HRH Elizabeth II to be tweeting updates about the Royal Corgis as the account is run by teams at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House and give information about royal engagements and other updates.

http://www.twitter.com/jayxtreme

Been a bit quiet in recent weeks but he’s back with a good mix of social and business help tweets

http:///www.twitter.com/NikkiPilkington

Been looking back at Nikki’s TweetMentor course and she has really delivered with this. Even if you don’t buy her course, Nikki has lots of good info about how to get the most out of Twitter (including a great idea about putting #followfriday on a blog).

http://www.twitter.com/ClaireHammond

Claire is a great social tweeter. Lots of good links and RTs (re-tweets) and always ready to have a bit of a chat.

Thats all for now.

Have a great weekend and don’t forget, if you want to follow me on Twitter, click on the little birdy on the side bar.

Here is a quick tip to help generate a little bit more revenue from your blog.

Virtually all Wordpress blogs allow you to customs the sidebars of your blog using the various widgets that are available. One of these widgets is a search box. Instead of using the Wordpress widget you may want to consider using a Google Search Box linked to your Google Adsense account. Providing you also use categories to index your posts, visitors will still be able to find the information they want on your blog.

If they can’t find what they want and are going to click away from your site, you may as well get paid for it.

I mainly use Wordpress but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use the Google Search Box on other types of blogs such as Blogger providing they let you add HTML snippets.

In case you didn’t know, a weekly event takes place on Twitter called #followfriday.

The idea is that you recommend a few people to follow (simple enough).

However, as Twitter has grown more and more popular, #followfriday has almost turned into a wave of spam with lists of Twitter IDs.

One of the people I follow is Nikki Pilkington (http://www.twitter.com/NikkiPilkington) and for a while Nikki (and others) have been trying to encourage people to include a reason why they should follow the people they recommend.

This week, Nikki has taken it a step further and is using her blog to recommend people for #followfriday. She just includes a link to the blog post and the advantage is that the restriction of 140 chars is gone.

I think this is a great idea and I’m giving it a go to so here are my #followfriday recommendations for Friday 3rd July 2009:

http://www.twitter.com/PerryBelcher

Perry really knows social media and is well worth following as he gives a lot of good tips and links to help you.

http://www.twitter.com/SteveWeber

If you want to learn more about Adsense, Steve is a good guy to follow. He’s got some great information on his websites and is happy to answer any questions you may want to direct at him

http://www.twitter.com/JULIANBRAY

Julian is a UK based broadcaster who has some good views on current affairs in the UK.

http://www.twitter.com/GuidoFawkes

An insider into the workings of the UK Parliament and doesn’t show any political bias on his blog.

http://www.twitter.com/ClaireHammond

Claire is a lovely, friendly person who is happy to chat with you and brings a bit of light to your day with some jokes she has managed to dig out from the web.

http://www.twitter.com/ExplorerTravel

This is my own UK based travel business and we send out a lot of travel related news and offers every day

http://www.twitter.com/NailSpecialist

My wife is a nail technician and is just breaking into the world of Twitter. She has some excellent info on her blog about nail art and also caring for your nails.

http://www.twitter.com/NikkiPilkington

Finally, Nikki. She is a superstar and has given me a lot of guidance with her in depth knowledge of how to get the most from Twitter. Her Tweetmentor course is excellent so if you are serious about Twitter, you have to follow Nikki

So thats it for my first #followfriday blog post. In future, I’ll try to recommend people who have caught my eye during the previous week.

Have a great weekend