Month: August 2009

  • Using Google Reader’s “Send To” feature in WordPress

    I’m a heavy user of Google Reader (GR). In fact, I pretty much read all of my web content from GR. I rarely visit a blog directly. It’s so much easier to aggregate all of my favourite blogs in GR and read them that way. It makes me more efficient, as I can quickly skim through tens or hundreds of posts. And, I can email interesting posts to friends. I use gmail, and Google has integrated the ability to send to people in my address book directly from GR. Easy peasy.

    A new-ish feature of GR is the ability to “Send To”. Basically, within a post in GR, I can send some content to another app. Some default places a post can be sent is Blogger, delicious, Digg, Facebook and Twitter. But I use WordPress. What’s a person to do? Well… there’s good news. The good folks at Google have opened up the API to allow additional “Send To” locations to be added. So, a bit of tinkering and I was able to build in a custom “Send To’ so that I can submit stuff I read in GR directly to my blogs. This makes it much easier to blog about items that I find in my reading within GR.

    And, to help you out, here are the steps to add your own custom “Send To” for your WordPress blog:

    GRwirepaper

    1. In Google Reader, go to “Settings” (top right hand corner of the screen);
    2. Click the “Send To” menu option in the top nav bar of the settings area of GR;
    3. Select any default “Send To” places;
    4. To add your custom “Send To” destination, click the “Create a custom link” button at the bottom of the screen;
    5. Here are the settings that I used to get my wirepaper blog set up:
    6. Name: wirepaper.com
    7. URL:”http://wirepaper.com/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=${url}&t=${title}&s=${source}&v=2” (without the quotes and obviously, replace the “wirepaper.com” with your domain name)
    8. Icon URL: http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/e64c700ba8356e85df84a3da28224b81?s=16&d=identicon&r=G (this is my custom avatar – feel free to substitute it with your favourite)
    9. Click “Save”.
    10. Voila! All done.

    Go back to GR and give it a try. Let me know how this works out for you.

  • Making money using Amazon’s affiliate program – some advice from ProBlogger

    ProBlogger Blog Tips offers some great advice on making money using Amazon’s affiliate program. It’s worth the read. Here are Problogger’s tips, broken into three posts:

     11 Lessons I Learned Earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program

    10 More Amazon Associate Program Lessons I Learned on My Way to Six Figure Earnings

    10 Last Tips on Making Money from the Amazon Affiliates Program

    What’s your experience been like using Amazon’s affiliate program?

  • Awesome web developer cheat sheets

    I’m a big fan of this post by carsonified: 17 Awesome Web Developer Cheat Sheets

    There’s nothing like a simple, one page cheat sheet reference for the stuff that you work with the most. All of the necessary functions at a glance. What more could you need?

    In fact, this post by carsonified has motivated me so much, that I’m adopting this strategy at my day job. I manage an operations team and over the years, I’ve compiled a fairly robust set of documents that explains our processes. I’m in the middle of updating them. But, instead of editing/updating the docs as they currently exist, I’m scrapping the whole thing and replacing them with a small collection of one (or two, at most) page cheat sheets. If I can’t fit all of the important stuff on a double sided sheet of paper, then there’s too much to know, and the items on the cheat sheets will never be handled properly anyways.

    We’ll see how it works out. I suspect it’ll lead to better understanding and use of established processes and tools.

    Your turn to share: What topics/tasks would you like to see on a cheat sheet?