Archive for 'Plugins'
Further to the TweetMeme Blogger Gadget introduced last week, we are increasing our support for Blogger users with a new template editor.
We realise that the positioning of the Gadget in the Sidebar isn’t ideal, as many would prefer it inline with their posts, so to overcome this you can use our new tool to insert the button directly into your blog template. The editor is also good news for bloggers using “Classic” templates to whom gadgets aren’t available.
To get your template code for editing, simply go to Layout then Edit HTML in your dashboard, and copy your complete template from within the textarea ([Ctrl+A] then [Ctrl+C] works well). If you are using advanced templates, please ensure the Expand Widget Templates box is ticked, though our editor will tell you if you forgot!
Once you’ve found and copied your template code you can start using the TweetMeme Blogger Template Editor.
With the addition of the editor, we’ve decided to bundle Blogger support in to a new Blogger menu page from which you can find the Gadget, the Template Editor, and a guide for manual editing.
Two in one day? Monsieur, with these plugins you are really spoiling us!
Hot on the heels of the TypePad Widget we now bring you a Blogger Gadget. This is a simple way to add the TweetMeme retweet button to your blog and place the button where you want it on your blog page without the need for editing your templates, all using the native Page Elements interface.
To get started just make your way over to the How to add the TweetMeme Gadget to Blogger page and follow the steps.
Ever wished it was a little simpler to add our retweet button to your blog? Well in continuing our steps to making your lives easier we’re pleased to announce the TweetMeme TypePad Widget! There is now a new page in the plugins section of the site which has all the great options to customise your button and how it retweets, and even has a live preview so you can see how it will all look before it’s added to your TypePad blog.
Unfortunately TypePad’s API only allows widgets to be added to those blogs using Drag-and-Drop Design Templates so if you are using Advanced Templates you will, for the moment at least, need to continue using the manual insert method described in our help page How to Add a TweetMeme Button to your TypePad Blog.
Head over to the TweetMeme TypePad Widget page to customise your button and get it added to your blog!
By default, the widget will be installed at the bottom of your side-bar but you are free to re-organise if you wish through the Organize Content section of your Design tab.
Support for many more sites is on the way.
I wrote a little while back that we would be soon launching some new variants of our popular retweet button. We have had the new versions in test since then and can today announce their public availability.
RSS & Email
The current Retweet Button is designed to be embedded in web pages and uses Javascript to make it do a few clever things (such as logged-in retweeting). The problem with Javascript is that it cannot be used within RSS or Emails as most RSS & email clients strip Javascript for security reasons. So we came up with the idea of rendering our button as an image which would allow you to embed it anywhere that would accept an image. We hope this new variant of the button will help you get even more retweets.
You can read how to implement the RSS button, and how to the implement the Email Button.
Plugin
To make life easier we have added support for the RSS button to our WordPress plug-in – if you already have the plugin installed you will see a whole load of new options including the new RSS functionality, you can turn it on/off and also position it separately within the RSS.
Shortening Services
We also previewed last week that we were adding support for choosing your own short url service. This has also now gone live and you can read the full instructions. We already support 11 services (listed below) plus 3 services in which you can also supply an API key so that the data is private to yourself. If you run one of these services which is not supported please get in touch.
Plugin
If you are using the WordPress Plug-in already you will find settings to specify the shortener.
Wordpress Statistics
Lastly you will notice that we have added a whole new page within our WordPress plug-in that gives statistics about retweeting for your last 5 posts. This gives you the 24 hour retweet trend graph for each story and a list of twitter users who have tweeted the story (useful in getting back in touch with those users who like your content.)
Success
We would like to thank everyone who has so far installed our button, we are currently serving over 50 million button impressions per day and it continues to grow daily. If you have any feedback on the new features please drop us a comment or head over to our discussion forum.
We never rest on our laurels here at TweetMeme HQ and have been beavering away on a range of improvements. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at a few new buttons launching next week.
Firstly one big change we have already made is to remove the (via @tweetmeme) from the end of any retweets. This will give a little more room at the end of tweets to be retweeted again.
Image Button
The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if your logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’. The downside is that Javascript can only live in certain places on the web, i.e. in a web browser.
We think there are lots of other places you may want to get retweeted from so we have come up with ‘image buttons’. These look identical to the current retweet button (an example is on the right) with the same live-retweet count, the big difference is that it is rendered as a image which means you can put it anywhere that you can put a normal image. Here are some ideas we had for using it,
- RSS Feeds – JavaScript does not work inside RSS (most RSS readers strip it out because of XSS security issues) so the button is perfect to allow your users to read your article and then retweet it.
- Emails – You can embed it into an HTML email to promote any link you like.
- Wordpress.com – Some sites like wordpress.com do not allow you to embed Javascript, but you can use this button instead.
Domain Count
We wanted a way that sites could show off how much they are getting retweeted beyond just the individual story retweet counts. So we came up with the ‘Weekly Retweet’ chicklet, it shows the weekly total number of retweets for your whole website. The counter re-calculates every 24 hours and the colour can be customized (examples on the right).
Analytics
Lastly we will be soon launching a much more detailed analytics package for website owners. You can already use TweetMeme to track the trend of a particular story (example here) and get the list of people who retweeted the story.
Websites can already track their weekly trends of retweets using TweetMeme (Example here) this is useful, but we wanted to give much more detail. The new package is aimed at fully understanding how your story spread and how you may adapt future story releases to take best advantage of Twitter and its amazing viral nature.
Today we got a really great e-mail into our inbox! Lee Turner who is part of the B2Evolution community has created a B2Evolution Plugin that does the equivalent to our wordpress plugin but for the B2Evolution blog engine. This means that those users who have been asking about how to integrate our button with B2Evolution can now have a nice simple way to do so. You’ll find all the information on how to install and use this plugin over on Lee’s TweetMeme plugin page.
Please direct any feedback of bug reports that you have back to Lee. This still leaves us with TypePad and better Blogger integration to go. We’re also looking into getting our plugin into Wordpress.com but we will be needing the help of the community for that one as we need to know how many of our users are wanting to install it into their Wordpress.com sites! We’ll come back soon with a post for you to register your interest in the Wordpress.com integration!
Image via Wikipedia
This evening whilst at a roller disco (don’t ask!) i heard the news that Michael Jackson had been taken to hospital and early reports were pronouncing him dead.
In order to keep up with the stories and what was becoming news I went back to the Michael Jackson channel that I creates to follow the news around his concerts. No surprise but it’s now starting to fill up with the latest confirmed and unconfirmed stories.
Keep up to date with it here: Michael Jackson Channel
We are on the hunt for intersting, unusual or useful places where you are finding our re-tweet button. This week has been no exception, interestingly we found that we are now on the Sky Blogs site of all places. So if you happen to read any of the sky blogs like “The Weather Girls” for example then you can now re-tweet whatever they are talking about!
As you may have already heard we are also on Governor Schwarznegger’s newsroom pages where you can read about his suggestion of replacing textbooks with digital books. Interestingly that particular story was re-tweeted via our button a number of times and the news of his announcement was debated over on our local radio station BBC Radio Berkshire. Personally I’m not so sure that completely doing away with paper books is the answer but a combined mix of online text and traditional books is the best solution for me. I wonder if the local radio station knew that he uses our button too?! It’s funny how stories end up travelling around the world and mix with local news too.
I’ll be watching the Sky Blogs and looking out for their stories and news popping up on our local radio station or in other random places! You never quite know where the next hot story will come from these days and Twitter has proven that time and time again.
We’re constantly looking out for sites that are using our button… anything from the most bizarre, obscure or most amusing use of our button on a site! Where have you seen the button in use? Where are you finding it most useful? Are you finding any sites where you wish they had the button? If so tell us! We love to hear your stories about the button!
(Random Fact:) 600 million TweetMeme buttons were served last month and we are possibly one of the largest growing re-tweet sites out there at the moment. Last month we grew 120% and we are now starting to see our button pop up all over the place.
Prior to today we had a restriction on the TweetMeme Button that all tweets were re-tweeted as RT @tweetmeme with the exception of those on the whitelist where they could do RT @their_twitter_account which allowed the re-tweet to be from a specific twitter account/ user. We got lots of feedback from our users… especially those who weren’t on the whitelist via our Forums and listened to their shouts! I bet they thought we were ignoring them! (but no, we were working away to ensure that the updates worked perfectly.)
So now everyone is whitelisted and you can change it to RT @[your twitter name]. We have updated the instructions on the Button page and we have also updated the Wordpress Plugin so that you change the twitter account easily. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings, TweetMeme and then set the Source to your twitter name. (e.g. talktweetmeme in my case) Don’t include the @ otherwise it’ll be @@talktweetmeme which wouldn’t really work.
We hope you like the update and the power it gives you as a user to see who is re-tweeting your stories and articles. It should also mean that you could create conversation around the stories online if you add those re-tweeting your stories as friends on twitter. I’m sure people will come up with all sorts of useful ways of using this new and very much requested feature!
Please do give us feedback and new feature requests on our Forum. We do read every request and we try to do those that are of value to many people as soon as we can!
Today we launched a shiny new feature called the TweetMeme Bar. And I’m betting that you want to know what it does, how it does it and so on! Well here’s the basic info… and when I manage to get Daniel in front of the video camera then I’ll also pop up a video of him going through all the cool ins and outs of the bar with you! For now however you’ll have to cope with my geeky descriptions of it all!
As you can see from the image above (you’ll need to click on it to see it properly though) going from left to right… We have our logo, then the re-tweet button including the number of times the link has been retweeted the name of the link text and then the information view options of All, News, Images or Video’s. Hit the re-tweet button and we’ll re-tweet the url that you are on. Hit home and we take you back home to our site… or if you’re curious and just want to browse to any random re-tweet site then hit the shuffle button and off you go!
The Shuffle button opens up a bar above stories and allows you to ’shuffle’ through stories that TweetMeme has found, this is gives you a unparalleled resource of interesting content. TweetMeme aggregates 200,000+ new links/stories/video/images every day and you have access to all of them. Just like the main site the bar lets you filter down by category and by the media type so you can discover things of interest to you.
We are very aware that some users do not like ‘framing’ of content and although the bar is ‘opt-out’ the first time you close the bar it prompts you immediately if you no longer wish to have the bar. It is also one click away on our settings pop-up to turn it on and off.
We think the logged in experience and tweetmeme bar make fantastic partners as you can shuffle through content and retweet what you like without leaving the page
We’re really excited about the TweetMeme bar and we do hope you like it. We’re finding it really fun when browsing websites to find what sites have our re-tweet button on it.
