Squeezing Twitter

One-hundred forty characters.  That’s all you get, 140.  Well, maybe that’s all Twitter will give you, but we can definitely fit more than 140 in there.  The main trick is to use URL shortening services, but that’s rookie stuff.  There are ways to get a lot more into your Twitter posts than just shortening a URL.  Let’s discuss at least two other ways you can use to get more into your Twitter posts… but first, let’s cover the rookie stuff.

Before you can really get the most out of your SEO on Twitter, you have to at least understand URL shorteners.  These are friendly little web applications that allow you to take a really long URL and turn it into a very short one.  For example, I recently used a service called bit.ly to turn this “http://www.christianfinancialblog.com/2009/06/the-value-of-money/” into this “http://bit.ly/3t3qjB“.  Much shorter, right?  This allows you to fit very long URLs into your 140 characters of Twitter.  We’ll write an article on this soon, but for now you can check out a service like bit.ly and see how it works.

Now for the more interesting secrets.

The first involves making shortened URLs even shorter.  Twitter recognizes the “http://” and turns the following text into a link.  However, we’re loosing 7 characters to do that!  That’s 5% of my total real estate!  Instead, we’re just going to put “www.” in front of any URL we shorten.  Twitter doesn’t care that it doesn’t end in .com, so you can just use www.bit.ly and twitter will turn that into a link.  Bam!  Even Shorter URLs!

Next is another way to shorten URLs and I’ll only mention this one briefly.  If you have a URL that you expect to update all the time, think about registering your own domain name for it.  For example, I frequently advertise my DVD Catalog website, DVDCorral.com.  To compromise between URLs that don’t convey information (bit.ly/#$@!^) and long URLs (www.DVDCorral.com), I bought an extra domain name.  I can now make posts with www.dvdc.at.  It’s short and to the point and still gives folks an idea of where they are going.  This cost me $15 / year and seemed worth it.  For odd domain extensions you may need to find a unique domain provider who sells domains from that country.

Finally, use special characters where appropriate.  For example, I often use ellipsis (…) as I did in the beginning of this article.  They represent 3 periods and a space usually.  On Twitter that means you’ve given up 4 characters to convey some amount of emotion or suspense.  Well, it turns out there is a character just for the ellipsis.  Just copy and paste that character into your Twitter message and you have turned 4 characters into one!  The extra space is actually included in the ellipsis special-character.

For your reference, here are some of the characters you can use on Twitter.  Use the “Share” button below to bookmark this page (with Digg, Flurl, StumbleUpon, etc.) so you can find it again later when you want to copy and paste these characters into your Twitter messages.

It’s been said that Dreamweaver has a way to do this, but no one has been able to tell me what that way is.  Frankly, I’m a developer so I don’t really care about what Dreamweaver has or doesn’t have, I just want it to work.  Turns out, there’s a really easy script that you can add to your site (or your client’s) that will allow visitors to fill out a form and then have that data e-mailed to the appropriate recipient.

First, you’ll need to setup a form on a page called userinfo.html.  This should be fairly easy to do whether you’re creating the site freehand or with web editing software.  When you name each element, that’s how our script will label them in the e-mail, so be sure to label them clearly.  Dreamweaver seems to like to label things a37_infrared, so let’s just make sure they’re human readable names.  For example, to create a field to receive the users first name, it should look something like:

<input name="firstname" type="text" />

In the e-mail, this will output something like “Firstname: Joe”.  That should be close enough for our purposes.  Once you’ve finished the form, just set the action to the PHP script we’re about to create.  That makes our form tag (in userinfo.html) look something like this:

<form name="userform" action="processform.php" method="POST">

Now, for the part you’ve been waiting for.  Make processform.php (this is a new page and separate from userinfo.html) a nice HTML page that let’s the user know that you have received their information.  Again, do this in any way that is easy for you to create your HTML pages.

For this to work, it does require that the server can run PHP.  The server also needs the ability to send e-mail, but most servers do both of these just fine.  It shouldn’t be a problem for most people, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Now, at the very top of the processform.php add the following lines:

<?php
$body = “”;
$subject = “You received a new request from example.com”;
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) $body .= ucwords($key) . “: $value\n”;
mail (‘myname@example.com‘, $subject, $body);
?>

You can now replace the text after “$subject” with the subject line of the e-mail you would like to receive.  Then replace “myname@example.com” with your e-mail address (or obviously that of your client’s).  Now every time they fill out your form it will send you e-mail with their details.

Not bad for 4 lines of PHP, eh?

Use a thumbnail image for attractive links

It’s time for a beginner post. Mostly because my brother has been asking about how to post thumbnails, but also just because it seemed like other people probably had the same questions. There are a lot of things that can be done with links online. In this article, we’re just going to touch on the basics and we can fill in the gaps in a later post.
Links are just a way of referencing material online. In order to do that, you need 2 things: 1) The address of the material you are referencing. 2) The content which will send the user to that material. By content, we refer to either text or a graphic. When you click that text or graphic, you then go to the referring webpage.

So first, let’s look at a simple link:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com">Helpful Website</a>

This link starts with a tag, which opens <a.  We must end the tag with a greater than (>), but not until we specify the address to which we link.  That is specified in the href parameter of the a-tag (<a>).  In this case, our address is http://www.internetstarting.com.  Always be sure to enclose the address in quotes.  Then we end the a-tag (which is short for Anchor, BTW).    So far we’ve covered:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com">

Next, we have “Helpful Website”.  This is the content of our link, or the anchor text.  In our case it is just text, but we’ll add images later.  This anchor text is what is going to actually be displayed to our user.  Finally, the <a> tag we opened must be closed.  HTML tags are closed with a forward-slash in front of the tag.  Our closing anchor tag would then look like this: </a>.  Now, when shown online, our link will look like the following:
Helpful Website

Now, let’s go about adding an image in there.  To do that, we’ll need to use the image tag, which is simply, <img>.  Similar to the link, we need to supply a parameter to the image tag and that is the location of our image.  This is usually on our site, but it could be anywhere on the web.  In the image tag, that address will be put into the “src” attribute.  So, we’re going to have something that looks like this:

<img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg"

Again, notice that we have to put the parameter to “src” in quotation marks.  Finaly, we’ll close the image tag.  This is a little different than closing the anchor tag because we’re going to use some HTML shorthand.  Because the img doesn’t have any content (only the src attribute here), we can close it immediately.  So, we’re just going to add “/>” instead of our nomal “>” followed by “</img>”.  Our entire image tag now looks like this:

<img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg" />

Now, let’s make that a link.  All we’re going to do, is take our anchor text (which was Helpful Website) and replace it with our image tag.  Now we have:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com"> <img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg" /> </a>

or

<a href=”http://www.internetstarting.com”>

<img src=”http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg” />

</a>

Now, we have an image used as the content for our link.  When you click the image, it will still take you to the homepage for InternetStarting.com.  One last thing before we show you the image and link.  It would be a little big to add to this post again, so let’s shrink our image.  We could use photo editing software to shrink the image, or for images that are reasonably small we can just cheat a bit.  We’re going to add two more parameters to the image tag.  They are “height” and “width” and you can probably imagine what they do.  Let’s make our new thumbnail image 80×47 (1/4 the size of the original).  The code would now look like this:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com"> <img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg" width="80" height="47" /> </a>

There, now you can see what the thumbnail will look like at 1/4 of its size.  This is not recommended for very large images however as it will slow down your site.  We’re actually using a big image and displaying it as a small image.  For example, if you were to take an image directly from your camera and “cheat” the image tag, it might take 15 or 30 seconds to load this tiny image on your site.  That’s not very efficient and why it would then be better to use some photo editing software to actually save the picture in a smaller format and just use that instead.

One last thing on links for the beginner.  Sometimes you will see a very, very long link.  These especially show up at affiliate sites like Amazon.com.  In fact, you might even see a full web address inside the web address which is in the href.  Don’t let this confuse you!  We’re only concerned with what’s between the quotation marks.  So, <a href=”someReallyReallyLongStringIsOK”> — even if it’s several lines long.  Just look for the closing quotation mark and you will be fine.

For anyone still having trouble with links or who has other questions, use the comment link below.  Let us know what trouble you’re having with links and we’ll see if I, or someone in the community here, can help you out.