chrisduran.eu

The Wifi-in-Australia project has had its first major external development. Earlier in the week, I was contacted by Josh Liebmann, who has been generous enough to donate some of his time to start up a Sydney wireless hotspot map for WiFi in Australia.

Josh is a twitter user, and found out about the project by the wifi-in-australia twitter page.

I’ve been pretty amazed by how this project has really taken off using twitter and I think really shows how powerful twitter currently is as a social media marketing tool. I’ve been actively maintaining both a Facebook Group for the project, and a twitter page. I started pushing the facebook group about 3 weeks ago, and pushing the Twitter page about 2 weeks ago.

The facebook group has a little less then 100 members, whilst the WiFi in Australia now has around 150 followers on Twitter (and this number is very literally growing DAILY, averaging an extra 10 followers a DAY). Interestingly though, 30% of the traffic comes from facebook, compared to around 20% of the traffic coming from twitter. Despite this, most of the community activity on Wifi in Australia has originated from the Twitter followers.

There are a few possible reasons for this. The most likely (to me at least) is that I believe the twitter followers of WiFi in Australia represent a slice of the online community that have a greater interest in Wireless internet (and computing culture in general) then their facebook cousins. This is in no small part due to many of the Twitter followers coming from the follower list of freeAusWireless.

Any other ideas of why this might be the case? Throw your theories at me!

Filed under: IT, social media by Chris

Just listened to a really inspiring interview of Eben Pagan by marketing guru Frank Kern. It is about 6 months rusty now, but I HIGHLY recommend anybody who wants to know how the ‘big guys’ in life advice and internet marketing became successful in life should listen to this interview.

Here is the link to the interview:

http://gurumastermindvideoblog.com/2008/05/frank-kern-interviews-eben-pag-1.php

And, actually, check out Eben’s blog too whilst you’re at it!

Filed under: positive thinking by Chris

I’ve been reading up a fair bit on social media advertising. I’ve been using twitter as a way to promote my WiFi Mapping project, WiFi in Australia. WiFi in Australia has been up for a little over two weeks now. I started a facebook group at the start of the project, and actively sent invites to people that I knew. I also started a Twitter account (wifi_australia). I only started actively started sending invites to people on Monday.

It is now Wednesday, and already 40% of my total traffic to my site has originated from Twitter and the number of people following my wifi twitter account increase everyday. What I wanted to know is which linking posts were attracting users to my site.

The use of URL-shortening services is popular on micro-blogging sites such as twitter, where character-efficiency is important. There are many services that do this, but some are starting to provide link-through statistics.

TweetBurner allows users to track the number of clicks for a given shortened URL, and users can display a summary of shortened URLs and their clickthrough count when logged in to their service.

TweetBurner is also supported by popular twitter apps such as TweetDeck (twurl). I have also found a modified version of Twitter Tools by Rebelic.com that supports TweetBurner URL-shortening. Twitter Tools is a popular plugin for Wordpress, that will notify a configured Twitter account of new blog posts, and link to the permalink. Now, with a mixture of TweetBurner and Twitter Tools (TweetBurner edition), I can track the clickthrough count for my blog posts!

A promising new URL-shortener and conversion tracker is Twitclicks. Twitclicks give a much deeper analysis of the click-through events. For a given link, it will show you the total number of clicks, the percentage of your followers that have clicked and a breakdown of stats on the user including browser, OS, geographic location, click source (website or external app) and even screen resolution.

Twitclicks is by far the most comprehensive click-through service I have seen. Unfortunately it is not yet supported by many apps (read: my favourite twitter app, TweetDeck) and I am yet to find a Wordpress plugin for it.. but I am sure these will come soon!

TweetBurner: http://tweetburner.com/

TweetClicks: http://www.twitclicks.com/

Twitter Tools (TweetBurner.com edition): http://rebelic.nl/tweetburnercom-plugin/

Filed under: social media by Chris

Firefox is a great browser and is becoming the browsing standard. It is cross-platform, standards-compliant, as extendable as Katee Sackhoff is gorgeous and as of version 3, pretty fast. I used to use Safari on the Mac back in the Firefox 2 days, as Firefox 2 was slow, prone to crashing, and ugly. Once Firefox 3 came out, I jumped at the opportunity to switch back to the Mozilla camp (in the interest of supporting cross-platform, open-source projects!).

The Firefox 3 interface for OSX is pretty good, but I’ve become accustom to some of the features of Safari 3, such as the minimal screen real estate, private browsing and resizable text fields. I’ve compiled a list of plugins and themes I used to get my Firefox working like the safari I knew!

For each addon I’ve linked to the homepage of the developer where possible, which is only fair with regards to true credit. If you would prefer the links for the official Firefox Addon Repository, they can be found at the end of the post in a table.

The Theme

The theme I found that best replicates the safari interface is Arronax’s GrApple Yummy (graphite) theme. There are four themes on the site, you may like on of the others better, but I felt this one was the truest recreation.
[GrApple Yummy (graphite)  -  http://www.takebacktheweb.org/]

Combined Progress/Address bar

The Fission addon moves the progress bar from the bottom status bar and combines it with the address bar. It is quite customisable and has a feature that I feel allows you to break apart from the status bar all together. I always kept the status bar on in Safari as I want to know where the link I click is heading, and the URL when mousing over a link is displayed in the status bar by default. With Fission, you can have the URL show in the address bar for the current link.
[Fission  -  http://mozilla.zeniko.ch/fission.html]

Private Browsing

This is by far one of the most important features of Safari. I think it is a mushave when visiting sites linked in any way to your financial details, such as internet banking, PayPal, eBay, etc.. The Distrust addon gives Firefox a similar ability. It will take note of when it is first turned on and when it is next turned off, deleting any private data recorded in the meantime including: passwords, history, cache, etc..
[Distrust  -  http://www.gness.com/distrust/]

Resizable Textarea

Another handy feature in Safari, this is great for resizing comment fields on blogs or online email contact forms to a size that is actually useable! The addon here is called Resizeable Textarea by Raik Jürgens. The resizing can be slightly finicky when trying to find the anchor for diagonal resizing, but it is still very useable.
[Resizeable Textarea - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3818]

Combined Stop/Reload button, and hide the main throbber.

I have combined these two features, as they require the same plugin! In Safari, when a page finishes loading, the Stop button gets replaced by the Reload button, and vice-versa. Also, each individual tab has a throbber icon that represents loading activity. Firefox also has a master throbber to the right of the address bar, which many feel is is redundant (and indeed missing from Safari). Stylish is an addon that allows you to add ‘modules’ that modify the CSS outlay of the Firefox interface.
[Stylish - http://userstyles.org/stylish/]

Once Stylish is installed (and firefox restarted) you can visit Stylish module pages to adjust the appearance and behaviour of Firefox.

Combined Stop/Reload button module:
http://userstyles.org/styles/10 – IMPORTANT, make sure you follow the instructions provided for this addon to work properly!

Hide Throbber module:
http://userstyles.org/styles/13762

Official Firefox Addon Links

GrApple Yummy (graphite): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7525
Fission: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951
Distrust: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1559
Resizeable Textarea: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3818
Stylish: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108
[Stylish modules: http://userstyles.org/styles/10 , http://userstyles.org/styles/13762]

DONE!

This has given me an experience that is pretty similar to using Safari, but with some of the extra benefits of Firefox, I like the better support for tabbed-browsing in Firefox, and I really like the del.icio.us plugin. Let me know if you know of any other addons for Firefox that have helped make Firefox feel more OSX-like.

Filed under: tips and tricks by Chris