Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do. As an individual you might not care too…
Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it’s really not much different from what we’ve done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong. Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a…
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page. Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author’s “infographic”…
Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature: Starting today you can make your…
Update: September 7, 2012 I misunderstood how browser load external JavaScript files when that load itself comes from embedded script. Ben Ward explained it to me and referenced this handy article, Thinking Async. The gist of the article is that using JavaScript to write in a call to a JavaScript…
If you’ve used the Twitter web interface much you might have noticed that sometimes a tweet that links to a popular site includes previews of the pictures, or perhaps video, or even maps. For example, when I check into a venue on Foursquare and allow that to be auto-tweeted, the…
Back in September 2010 Twitter changed how its site renders by pushing much of the processing to the web browser using JavaScript and hash-bang (#!) URLs. Today Twitter has announced it is essentially dumping that approach: To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we’ve been working to take back control…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on its web site, and it is the only entity with the right to reproduce it. The Internet has a thing for cats.…
It’s been a few weeks since Twitter moved to its own link shortening service for tweets. Originally the shortener only kicked in for tweets over 18 characters, but Twitter recently moved to have it affect all URLs in tweets. Twitter’s argument was that this allows Twitter to reduce the number…
One of my un-fondest memories from my early days of web development was the constant client request for web site counters at the bottom of a new web site. Trying to explain to clients that showing a rather low number of visitors might not be something they want to brag…
I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them “artists”). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that…
There was once a time that if you wanted to lodge a complaint with a company or organization, you could rely on writing a strongly-worded letter. You might get a response in 6-8 weeks. Then came a point when you could call a support line and speak to a human…