Adding the NEW twitter follow button and other twitter widgets to your blog

Just yesterday Twitter launched a new “Follow” button that will make life easier for all of us twitteraholics.

Before now, you had to put a link to your twitter page and then potential fellow tweeters had to click “follow” there. Now, they can do it all from your site with one single click.

He’re an example for my account. Go head – click follow – I won’t mind!

Follow @ronnieburt

So how do you add one to your blog?

Twitter makes it easy to grab embed code for your own personal follow button here.

We’ll walk you through the steps, but if you want to know more about embedding, you should check out the in-depth post here from our Teacher Challenge blog.

1. Visit the Twitter Resource page for the Follow button

2. Choose from the available options and then copy the code that appears on the right side

3. Paste the code into the HTML tab of a page or post. A popular place might be to put it on your Contact or About page.

How To Embed In a Sidebar

You can see that we’ve embedded the follow button into the sidebar of this blog on the left side under our photos.

Here’s how to this:

1. Complete steps 1 and 2 from above (which is to go here)

2.  Go to Appearance > Widgets in your blog dashboard

3.  Click on the desired Sidebar to expand (so you can add the widgets)

4.  Add a text widget to the desired sidebar by dragging it from the Available Widgets into the Sidebar area on the right.

5.  The widget will automatically open — just add the HTML code for your follow button or widget, click Save and then Close.

6.  That’s it!

What other twitter widgets can you add?

Using the exact same steps as embedding the follow button, you can also add several other twitter widgets too!

All of the different widgets and options can be found here.

Here are a few on display for you too see:

The Profile Widget








The Search Widget








Edubloggers List Widget

Other Twitter Resources

• A twitteraholics guide to tweets, hashtags and all things twitter


• To hashtag or not to hashtag


• Edublogs on Twitter

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Blogging with an iPad: Choosing a web browser, setting up your theme and adding widgets

My iPad is a significant part of my life.  It goes almost everywhere with me and is the one device I can’t live without for both work and leisure.

With more educators looking at iPads as a replacement for student laptops and netbooks, we’re regularly being asked for blogging tips using iPads.

So I’ve decided the best way to provide advice is build a new blog using just my iPad and post about it as I go!

Web browsers on the iPad

Lets start by talking about web browsers since you’ll need to use one as you’re setting up your blog.

While Safari is the default web browser on an iPad there are apps that provide considerably better browsing with greater functionality than Safari.

Alternative web browsers for iPads include:

• Atomic Web – US$1.19


• iCab mobile -  US$2.49


• iChromy – free


• Skyfire- US$2.99

I’ve decided to use iCab mobile because:

1. It has the richest feature set


2. It supports tab browsing so you don’t have to keep zooming in and out of your browser to move pages


3. I’m able to access more blog features inside my dashboard than any of the other browsers

You can choose to use Safari rather than purchase an app like iCab mobile however support of tab browsers makes the process considerably easier and quicker.

Here’s a quick comparison of the main differences between these browsers:

Tip:

• The iPad’s dock at the bottom of the screen where you can ’stick’ icons of your favorite apps so they remain accessible from all other Home screens can hold up to six different apps.


• To add more icons to the iPad dock, or replace existing apps, just touch and hold any Home screen icon until the icons begin to wiggle.


• Now drag the app you want to add from the Home screen into your dock.  When complete, press the Home button to save.

The most annoying aspect is Safari is the default browser and, unlike a computer, you can’t change this on an iPad.  So instead I’ve added iCab Mobile to my iPad dock to make it easier to access.

Creating the blog

Now it’s time for me to create the blog.

I’m creating it via the Edublogs sign up page using  iCab mobile however:

1. If you’re new to blogging start by reading these things to consider before creating your blog


2. If you’re setting the student blogs follow these instructions

Tip:  A handy shortcut is to doubletap on your home button. This brings up a toolbar which makes it easy to navigate around your iPad apps.

Setting up the theme

Now my blog is created it’s time to give it my personal touch by choosing a new theme.  Last thing I want is it to look like all the other newly created blogs!

Changing the theme was simple.

All I needed to do was:

1. Log into my blog dashboard using iCab mobile (or you can use Safari)


2. Go to Appearance > Themes


3. Click Activate below the theme I wanted to use

If you’re struggling to decide on a theme it’s best to activate a theme you want to check out and then view your blog in another tab, than to use Preview — it’s less time consuming.

Here’s where you’ll find more information to help you choose your theme:

1. What to consider when choosing your blog theme


2. The 137 Edublogs Themes Separated Into Categories To Make Choosing Your Next Theme Easier

I’ve decided to use PrimePress because it’s a nice clean theme that suits my purpose.

Uploading the custom image header

While changing the theme was simple, uploading a custom image header wasn’t. It’s definitely something that’s considerably less painful using a computer.

But it can be done and here’s what you need to know:

• The easiest option is to use a free image header that is close to the image header size you need to upload


• You need to use iCab Mobile as most iPad web browsers won’t let you locate images on your iPad to upload


• You need to make sure the image is exactly the size recommended on the Appearance > Custom Header page because you can’t crop images in the dashboard on an iPad

Here’s how I did it:

1.  Downloaded a free image header from FreeWebPageHeaders

• Images from FreeWebPageHeaders are a standard size of 800 pixels wide by 200 high which means for most themes you’ll need to resize and crop.

2.  Resized the image to 920 pixels wide using iResizer (Us$1.19).

• There’s lots of image resizers you can choose from.


• I just found this app the easiest of the ones I already have and it’s handy to have a good image resizer.

3.  Opened up the resized image in PhotoGene (US$2.49):

• cropped to 920 pixels wide and 150 pixels high (size required for uploading)


• Added text


• Saved the image

There’s lots of image editors you can choose from.  This app is easy to use and is handy for cool image editing.

4.  Then reopened my new custom image header in iResizer to check:

• it was definitely 920 pixels by 150 pixels


• otherwise I wouldn’t be able to upload.

5.   Next I logged into my blog dashboard using iCab mobile

6.  Went to Appearance > Custom Header

7.  Clicked Select File, selected image from Camera Roll and clicked Upload image.

Presto!

My new image header is now on my blog!

You can check out the progress of my blog building on an iPad here!

Changing the tagline

The concept behind a blog tagline is to create a memorable phrase that sums up the tone and premise of a blog.

Changing the tagline was simple.

All I needed to do was:

1. Log into my blog dashboard using iCab mobile (or you can use Safari)


2. Go to Settings > General


3. Add my new tagline and click Save Changes.

Changing Widgets

You can’t drag and drop widgets on an iPad.

You can, however, still add widgets with relative ease using the following steps:

1.  Select ’screen options’ from the tab at the top.

2. Enable accessibility mode

3.  Click add on the widget you want to add

4.  Add the information

• In my situation I need to add an attribution for the image I’ve used

5.  Then decide where it goes

6.  Click Save Widget

You can learn more about working with widgets here!

Final thoughts

My blog is now set up ready for me to start adding content.  You can see how the blog is going here (if you can bear it’s current messy state!)

The next post in this series is all about creating and editing posts and pages using an iPad.

Please let us know:

1. What have I missed?


2. What other advice would you give?


3. Or are there any other questions you would like answered?

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Adding a Bit of Workflow to WordPress

As much as I love WordPress, one of the areas it really lacks is workflow. There are three basic statuses for posts (draft, pending review and published), but there’s very little difference between “draft” status and “pending review.” When a post is saved as “Pending for review”, nothing happens automatically. No email messages are dispatched to any of the site’s editors or administrators, no special, obvious flags fly within the admin area, etc. It might as well just be a “draft” for all intents and purposes. The idea behind creating the “pending review” status was to allow editors and administrators to tell the difference between an in-progress draft and a draft that was ready to be published, but that seems to be about it.

Further, once a post is published, any changes made to it are automatically published, without any way for another user to review those modifications.

As a blogging platform, workflow is very rarely necessary, but as WordPress becomes more and more of a website content management system, especially among corporate customers, that lack of workflow can become a bit of an issue.

There are a few plugins, though, that aim to help WordPress achieve a little more footing in the area of workflow.

First, there are quite a few plugins that set up admin notification for drafts and/or “pending” posts. The one that I have used in the past was called “WP Status Notifier” by iDope, but it seems to have been removed from the WordPress repository for some reason (the author is currently investigating the issue). However, a quick search of the WordPress repository offers up quite a few results for alternative options.

To handle the workflow issues related to modifying published posts, I wrote a new plugin to do just that. The Post Revision Workflow plugin was pushed into the WordPress repository today. You can read more about the plugin and see some screenshots on my plugin website. It’s an extremely simple plugin that is in the infancy of its development, but it seems to get the job done. If that’s not quite to your liking, there are one or two other plugins listed in the repository that seem to be after the same goal. Based on the descriptions (I have not installed or used any of the others), Edit Flow looks especially promising.

Find more stories about: Curtiss Grymala, wordpress

This story posted on CenterNetworks.

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