Technology Solved

Just another Junction30 Sites site

Archives for June 2013

How to get a new twitter widget to fix that broken tweetstream.

By 2 Comments

Twitter API upgrade leads to broken twitter widgets

At the end of last week, Twitter upgraded API from 1.0 to 1.1. (API is how external sites link to twitter’s code.) The result was that lots and lots of tweetstreams on blogs and sites around the internet broke.

It’s likely that if you’re in that situation, you’re hoping that a developer is just going to roll out a fix, you’ll press an upgrade button, and all will be well again. Sadly, that’s not the case. The new design means that you’ve got to create a twitter app to make most plugins work, or your developer may need your twitter login to do it for you.

The twitter widget – a simpler option

There is a simpler option. Remove the plugin/ broken widget, and get yourself a shiny new twitter widget. No log in needed, and all customisable.

Pop over to twitter here and fill in the settings.

create twitter widget

There are some options you can use to customise your code.

The ones you are most likely to want are:

data-theme=”dark” – light! Always light! (The default is light, so if you want light, you don’t need this bit at all.)
data-link-color=”#cc0000″ – probably nice to set this to be the same colour as the navigation links on your site?
data-tweet-limit=”3″ – personally I think 5 is a nice number.

But I don’t want a widget!

For wordpress obviously there are a number of plugins. Some of them, including the one I’ve been using based on the Genesis framework, haven’t been updated yet. The drawback is that even if you use them, you have to create a twitter app, which means going to twitter, and doing set up, and putting in your user details. By the time you’ve done that, you might as well do the widget instead. The widget solution is actually more straightforward, and isn’t affected by rate limits, whereas I think apps are.

What do you do with your widget code? You need to paste it into your sidebar. For wordpress I’ve used a text widget which takes html, and that’s worked fine so far.

As always, do check out the terms and conditions of use of this sort of thing – for example, while embedding a single tweet is fine, it looks to me that a conversation with interspersed comment is not (see Display Requirements, point 6), which makes me wonder how come storify is still running. But there you go. Enjoy your widget!

Twitter cards – what they are and how to integrate.

By 2 Comments

Twitter cards are the latest upgrade to twitter that allows you to add extra information to your tweet when sharing a link. They come in a number of different formats – the one that is most likely to be useful to a business or personal blog is the summary card, which adds a headline, excerpt and pic. Big platforms like wordpress.com have already implemented cards for their users – but it’s easy to do if you’re self hosted as well.

Still not sure what they are? Here’s an example – my first tweeted article from technology solved that includes a twitter card.

The card gives you that extra bit under the 140 characters, and hopefully makes your tweet that little bit more enticing to encourage click through. You’ve probably seen them on twitter from newspaper articles at the very least.

As you might imagine, there are a number of different ways to implement them for your site. Yoast’s WordPress SEO has a twitter section under social if you’re using it, or you can go for a standalone plugin that just does the card integration, which is what I’ve opted for this time, using Twitter Cards.

The plugin doesn’t require any set up, but you do then go to validate it at twitter itself. I was a bit dismayed once I’d filled in all the fields to get a message saying I’d get feedback in a few weeks – but being the impatient sort, I tested it anyway, and it worked fine.

Big hint: twitter cards apply to individual articles, *not* to your home page. If you look for the markup in your homepage you won’t find it, and if you try to validate your home page it will fail. Work from a post within your site. (There, I’ve just saved you the ten minutes I wasted doing it wrong earlier!) Also, it seems that short link tweets from the jetpack publicise don’t get the card associated with them, possibly because it’s not showing the validated domain?

And that’s about all there is to it. So off you pop and give it a whirl, and let me know how you get on. If you found this article useful, don’t forget to follow the blog either via email or on G+.

The absolute basics of SEO.

By 1 Comment

basics of SEO wordcloud

There’s an awful lot of nonsense spouted about search engine optimisation, as if it’s a difficult topic. It’s not. Here are the basics of SEO as I see them. Your mileage may vary.

A post should be 300-500 words. Good content is written for people, but works for search engines too. A good post summarises the topic in the title, and in the first paragraph, talks about in the main text and summarises in the final paragraph. It’s the tell them three times principle – tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.

Stick to the point – don’t wander or go off topic. This gives you naturally keyword rich text. (If you’ve got something else to talk about, write another article!)

Use a good platform, like wordpress, which lays the article out well for you. You can use a plugin like wordpress seo from yoast, which will check your text for you and make sure you’ve got the words you need in the right places. WordPress also promotes good site navigation, allowing your readers, and visiting spiders to find all your content easily.

Lift relevant content into your current article by deep linking to related articles. This promotes your authority as having a bank of material on your topic.

And after that, it’s about the promotion, which is where the social media and social search is increasingly coming in. You need to set up authorship, so that search results have that smiling face in them. Brands/ businesses probably also ought to have a page, (facebook and g+) so that they can have a unified presence, but authorship is about individuals.

There’s also something possibly coming in about author rank, which is about authority of that author, but that’s not confirmed yet, so may or may not be worth worrying about. If you’re doing content building and authorship well, author rank should flow naturally out of it.

People will tell you it’s all about the backlinks. Once upon a time that might have been the case, though that can be argued. It’s increasingly less so. Good content will promote inlinks and sharing, which will do the same thing anyway.

So there you go. The basics of SEO coming down, as always to good content, presented well.