Everyone has heard of YouTube, but not everyone is aware of some of the other successful video sites like Metacafe. If you’re looking to do anything with videos on the Internet I would strongly recommend you look at how Metacafe can help. It’s free to create an account and upload your videos and my recent experience is that you have a better chance of getting people to view your video than on YouTube. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because there are fewer videos on Metacafe to wade through. Regardless, I posted two videos on Metacafe and the same two videos on YouTube. The results were amazing (at least to me!). The first video had 71 views on Metacafe in the first 18 hours, while only getting 8 views on YouTube. The second video I posted got 145 views in the first 3 hours on Metacafe and only 1 view on YouTube!! I was stunned to have the second video receive almost 150 views in the first 3 hours. Both videos are about 2 minutes long and pertain to Clickbank and the use of Clickbank Ads on your blog or web site. In both videos I show a link or watermark for one of my web sites that I’m promoting, but the videos do not directly mention or refer to the web site. This is a pretty common approach to promoting your site. Create a video with useful information and display your site’s URL via a watermark or closing caption.
I knew this day would come. I finally bit the bullet and decided to figure out how to create a Wordpress Plugin and Wordpress Widget. I did it as part of a new members-only web site that I’m creating and wanted to provide a way for members to easily display my data on their Wordpress blogs.
Like most things, once I got everything working it really doesn’t seem too difficult, but getting to that point was a little frustrating. I didn’t find very much in the way of good documentation and examples, so I just looked at a few of the plugins and widgets that I already use on some of my blogs and tried to figure out what they were doing.
The functionality of the plugin was pretty simple. I wanted to make it possible for members of my new site to be able to add some special syntax in a post and get info from a special RSS feed to be display. In order for the feed to display correctly the plugin requires a little configuration after the user has activated it. That meant I needed to create an "options" page. So, I needed to create a few functions and add some calls to the "add_action" function:
- add_action(’the_content’, ‘myPluginFunction’); - this call registers the function (myPluginFunction) I created that will get called when a page or post is displayed (that’s what the "the_content" means, it is one of the plugin actions you can register for)
- add_action(’admin_menu’, ‘myPluginSetup’); - this causes the myPluginSetup function I created to get called when Wordpress displays the admin menus. In the myPluginSetup function I created I just have a call to "add_options_page" to register a function that will display my custom option page that allows users to configure my plugin.
- The function I created to display my option page was pretty simple and there was decent documentation on the Wordpress developer site.
The widget was a little harder to get working because I wanted to allow the user to do a little configuration once they add it to the sidebar. Because I was trying to keep things pretty simple though, I was able to use the Wordpress functions of get_option and update_option for retrieving and story my options. This meant that I didn’t have to create a custom table and do any sql statements (not that I think that’s difficult, but it was just one more thing I didn’t want to have to deal with).
I still have some fine tuning to do, but I do feel pretty good about having gotten things to basically work. Now that I have one under my belt I just may have to go create some more!
I can’t believe I haven’t written a blog entry on this topic yet. I could have sworn I did, but it must have been for a different blog or in a different life ;). Anyway, I wanted to share with you a brief introduction to a great free blogging tool.
If you’re like me you have more than one blog. Each blog is focused on a specific topic and hosted on different sites. Some blogs may be hosted by a third party site like Blogger, while others are hosted on your own site using something like Wordpress. Regardless, having multiple blogs to log into and maintain can become a pain.
Introducing: Windows Live Writer!
Okay, I know what you’re thinking…how can Microsoft have a blogging tool that’s worth using? Well, I admit to being a bit skeptical at first, but since it is free I figured I’d give it a shot. It didn’t take long for me to become a big fan of the tool. It’s not perfect but it certainly does make things easier for me. It takes about 30 seconds to configure the tool for each blog that I have. I give it the URL for the blog, tell it what type it is (blogger, windows live, or "other"..which is Wordpress), and the username & password to log onto the admin of the blog. The tool does it’s magic and the blog is now available in the tool for me to post to.
Once the blogs are registered in the tool you can select one and create a new post or page. I like the fact that it is just as easy to create a new page as it is a new post. For SEO purposes it is often better to create a new page vs. a new post (but more on that topic in a different post…er, page :). The other nice feature is that you can create a post, post it to one of your blogs, and then select another blog site and post the same posting to that blog. That’s pretty cool when you have multiple blog sites that you want the same (or slightly different) posts to go to.
So, if you want a good, free blogging tool check out Windows Live Writer. And if you know of a similar free tool let me know!
