Foursquare and Myspace Added to Hootsuite
Mar 9th
Earlier today, Hootsuite released their latest version of Hootsuite. The latest features the options to sync Foursquare and Myspace.
What is Foursquare?
Four those that do not know about Foursquare, Foursquare combines social media marketing and gaming into an mobile app that encourages users to “check in” at cafes, pubs and other places. Users can alert friends, share tips and become the “mayor” of a location if they frequent the location more than other users.
What is Myspace?
MySpace.com is a social networking site where you can create a profile page that you can meet new friends, find old friends, and market your band or business.
How Do I setup Foursquare and Myspace on Hootsuite?
To install Foursquare and Myspace, follow these types.
- Click on settings
- Click on social media tab
- Click on add social media tab
- select Foursquare
- click on sign in with FoursquareID
- Then follow the rest of steps to complete the setup
- Follow these steps to add Myspace.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
- Foursquare + Google Maps = FourWhere (techcrunch.com)
11+ Tutorial Sites For Adobe Photoshop CS4
Mar 8th
Image by element321 via Flickr
One of my favorite tools as a designer is Adobe Photoshop CS4. Photoshop is powerful software tool for correcting digital images and working with abstract projects. I use Photoshop from editing personal photos to design projects. This tool can do almost anything you want. If it does not do something you want, you can can create macros and actions to create the same effects over and over again on other projects.
I have been using Photoshop for over a year now, and I still haven’t learned everything. At least once or twice a month I try and learn new techniques. Books and classes work great for the basics if you have the time. But, one of the easiest and fastest ways to learn Photoshop is through online tutorials. I prefer video tutorials but there are a lot of walk throughs out there that can help with less popular, but needed training in Photoshop
I have compiled a list of some the best Photoshop training sites out there. These are updated daily and they have everything from basic training to advanced training sessions with some of the best Photoshop professionals out there. Tell me what sites you use? I will add them to my next list I create.
Coffee With Hesham of Famous Bloggers
Mar 8th
Image via Wikipedia
A week ago I went to Houston to visit family. During some free time I got the chance to meet and visit with Hesham of Famous Bloggers. We met for coffee and ended up spending about 2 hours drinking coffee and talking about everything. This was not an interview maybe sometime in the future I will get the chance to interview him. I will be back in Houston sometime during the end of the month and we plan to get together if we have the time meet again.
I went into this meeting mostly as a chance of making new contacts and friends. What I came back with is a wealth of information about Hesham, not only about his personal life, but his life as a blogger and his future plans for several different websites he is working on.
During our talk, we talked about my site, my involvement with social media and helping him on few projects. By the end of our conversation I had learned a lot about blogging and advice about writing a better blog. Because of his advice, I will be starting a change to the content of Evolutionary Designs and moving more into design oriented posts. Of course I will still post about social media and blogging tips as both subject are part of new media.
So if you are wondering what I will be posting about in the future, I plan to post more about graphic design, web design, WordPress programming and design, and photography. I will continue to post about social media, SEO blogging resources, software, and technology advancement whenever I come across new information.
Daily Delicious Links March 5th
Mar 5th
Today I came across some more resources for designers. One of resources that I came across today is a special character shortcut keys cheat sheet. There are times in design a designer may need to use a special character. If its a character that the designer may not know. If that happens the designer will have to valuable time looking for the keyboard command to make this work. One of the links I found today has a large cheat sheet that has every special character that a designer may need.
I also found some more articles on CSS, photoshop tutorials, photo posts, and a guide to building the proper 404 error page.
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“Unlike most similar lists, Ultimate Cool Characters has more than just those so-called alt codes that we all know so well. It was painstakingly compiled to include a whole lot of weird characters that you have probably never seen before. Feel free to use any of them in your web pages and documents. After all, I didn’t make these up; I just compiled them.
Before going to the trouble of memorizing some of these codes, make sure you aren’t using an “International” keyboard layout that makes the typing of special characters much easier (usually through the use of the AltGr key, defined to be the right Alt key, or something similar).
Here’s a printer-friendly version… just make sure you have several dozen pages and plenty of ink. Print Preview is your friend.”
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Bluring images in photoshop
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“The top 10 such-and-such photos, or 25 amazing this-or-that pictures. If you’re like us, you click on almost every one of them. Themed photo galleries on blogs work for a simple reason: Almost everyone appreciates great pictures and enjoys sharing them with friends. If you can dream up a good theme, write a good headline, and deliver a payoff of stunning visuals, you’ve got a viral hit on your hands.”
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“collection of how-to articles, advice, resources and tools to help you create a unique background for your Twitter Profile. At the bottom, you’ll find some very useful online pattern/background generators that you can use for your Twitter background as well as your website or blog.
Read more: http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/how-to-create-a-unique-twitter-background/#ixzz0hLDFLu9g”
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“In the default WordPress Kubrick theme the 404 page (example) is probably one of the ugliest pages you’ve ever seen, and chances are yours is not any better. Today is the time to end that. This post will provide you with everything you need to make your “404 – File not found” page a starting point instead of a dead end street.
The goal of a good 404 page is simple: to make sure visitors landing on it continue browsing your site, and find the content they came for. Let’s get going.”
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An online generator for CSS to create rounded corners.
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“The word “calligraphy” is derived from two Greek words, denoting “beautiful writing”. Calligraphy or the art of writing has thousands of years in its history and development, and indeed calligraphy fonts, which we often use these days on our PCs to create a postcard or a wedding invitation card, are absolutely about aesthetics, refinement, creativity, and pure beauty.”
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“For that only reason, we have again looked deep into the Internet to find best 30 websites to download free e-books. So download free E-books which interests you more and enjoy reading with a cup of coffee.”
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Free eBooks!
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“CSS3 is the new kid in the stylesheet family. It offers exciting new possibilities to create an impact with your designs, allows you to use more diverse style sheets for a variety of occasions and lots more. We created this site because we want to share our experiences of CSS3 with you, and want nothing more than to simply be the biggest online resource covering CSS3. (Hey, we’re ambitious!)
At the moment we have three sections: a CSS3 Preview, which shows you individual CSS3 features that are implemented in browsers today, and how great they are. Next to that, we have the CSS3 weblog, where we have introductory articles and news concerning interesting CSS3 stuff as it comes along. The last section is the modules section, where we keep a list of the current modules and their status, and where we will add more and more compatibility tables.
This page is run by a few people, and since there is a slight chance you don’t know all of us, we thought we should introduce ourselves:”
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“Some of the most powerful administration plugins for WordPress.”
Daily Delicious Links March 4th
Mar 4th
Today’s delicious posts is all about design. If you looking for tips and tutorials in CSS, then check out the CSS links I found. There is a lot of good information about CSS design and coding. I also found a set of 150 free paper textures for you to use in your designs. If you are looking for design tools, check the link I found about the 10 most popular Firefox plugins for designers.
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“Rounded corners are a common CSS effect these days. There are several ways to accomplish this effect, and how you go about implementing rounded corners will depend largely on what purpose they will serve in your design. Keep this in mind, because it can save you hours of unnecessary work. In certain cases, rounded corners can be accomplished very easily, and in others they may be the single most challenging part of the design. This article will attempt to point you directly to the solution you need.”
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“undling all the best free downloads for new computer owners, re-installers, would-be geeks, or anyone who wants to save time installing the best stuff out there. This is our 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Windows computers.”
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“WebKit browsers paved the way with CSS based gradients. Now Firefox 3.6 is out and is supporting them as well, which makes using them for progressive enhancement all the more appealing. More good news, CSS3 gradients fall into the camp where you can specify fallbacks (i.e. images) so that browsers that don’t support them just use the image instead.
But wait… if you need to use an image anyway, why bother with declaring the gradient with CSS? That is kind of how I felt for a long time, but there is one important aspect that makes it worth it: browsers that support them don’t load the image fallback. One less HTTP Request = all the faster your site will load.”
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“WordPress doesn’t make it easy for you to engage your readers with images. You’re going to have to look beyond core to the hundreds of image/photo based plugins available to make your blog highly visual. Below, you’ll find a score of solutions to all your image/photo problems in the form of the best plugins around. There are lazy loaders, gallery creators, slideshow generators, photoblog initiators and much, much more. You’ll soon realize that there’s more to WordPress than a few lousy thumbnails!”
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“Basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.”
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Every plug-in on the list offers outstanding utility to developers who install them in their browsers. In fact, some of them are even considered indispensable. And they’re all available as free downloads for Firefox
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“It feels great to once again offer our readers quality articles. To keep the ball rolling, our latest offering indulges in top-rate resources for designers all over the design community. Take a minute to check out this cool free premium texture compilation for your next creation…
This 150+ Free Paper Textures for your Next Design post is basically a set of unique resources you don’t want to miss. Searched thoroughly throughout the web, you may be looking at the perfect texture for your current design. Who knows… this might help you make your latest master piece yet… As mentioned, these are freebies that you can download right into your desktop”
Now You Can Have A Counter with Your Google Buzz Submitter
Mar 2nd
Google Buzz has been out for about a month now, and everyday the popularity grows. Since almost day one, there has been a Buzz submit button. The button was created and was manually add to the code. Then a few days later a plugin was created and added to the WordPress plugin Directory. Then Digg Digg added a submit button to their list of social bookmarking tools. Even after these tools were created everyone wanted a counter added to the buzzer button, but no one created one. Last week Buzrr created a a script built on the idea of TweetMeme. Currently you have to manually add the script to the single.php. But if you can wait till tomorrow (March 3rd, 2010), a plugin for WordPress scheduled to be released.
How Do I Manually Install The Google Buzz Submit Script?
If you can not wait till tomorrow, or if you would rather install the script and style it the way you want it, you can follow these steps. The steps, are the same as my previous post on How to Add Google Buzz Submit Button. The first thing you need to do is go out to the Buzrr site and grab the code. Or you can grab the code here.
<script src="http://www.buzrr.com/button.js"> </script>
Next, log into your Wordpress Admin panel and click on the editor link under the section appearance section. Open the single.php or if you do not have that file, look for the index.php.
Once you have the file, then you simply need to add the script to where you want the submit button to appear. For this blog, I have appear before the content aligned to the right. So for this example, I will show how to place the code so it will display as I have mine.
In the single.php, look for the code
<!– post –>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(‘clearfix’); ?>><?php
if(function_exists(‘the_post_thumbnail’))
if (has_post_thumbnail()) $post_thumb = true; else $post_thumb = false;
?>
<?php if (!get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘hide_title’, true)): ?><h1 class="title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1><?php endif; ?><div class="post-content clearfix">
You will want to add your code after this. The original code looks like this.
<span style="margin: 0px 6px 0px 0px; float: Right;"><a
href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>" target="_blank" rel="nofollow external"><img
src="http://img2.pict.com/15/da/3e/2809374/0/googlebuzz.png" width="50" height="58" alt="" /></a></span>
I then removed the original Code and replace the code with the new code and I added my custom code to force the button to align right.
<span style="margin: 0px 6px 0px 0px; float: Right;"><script src="http://www.buzrr.com/button.js"> </script></span>
If you have more than one submit type buttons, this is what the code should like.
<!– post –>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(‘clearfix’); ?>><?php
if(function_exists(‘the_post_thumbnail’))
if (has_post_thumbnail()) $post_thumb = true; else $post_thumb = false;
?>
<?php if (!get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘hide_title’, true)): ?><h1 class="title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1><?php endif; ?><div class="post-content clearfix">
<span style="margin: 0px 6px 0px 0px; float: Right;">
<script type="text/javascript">url_site=’<?php the_permalink(); ?>’; </script>
<script src="http://www.mmosocialnetwork.com/sites/all/modules/drigg_external/js/button.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</span><span style="margin: 0px 6px 0px 0px; float: Right;"><script src="http://www.buzrr.com/button.js"> </script></span>
Weekly Link Love Feb 26
Feb 28th
This week was another busy one. Between last week’s trip to Shreveport, LA to visit friends, and being out of town this weekend to visit friends and family in Houston, TX, has made this week a short one. This week links have a lot of good information for bloggers. SEO tips, and social media tools.
20+ Reasons Why You Need to Start Guest Blogging - My Blog Guest
Why Do You Comment On Blogs? – Famous Bloggers
Removing DoFollow From This Site -Hot Blog Tips
Taking your SEO to the next level | Link Building – Blog Go Down
How To Increase Your Alexa Ranking by 8 Million Places in 11 Weeks – The Infopreneur
10 Non-Techie Blogging Tips – Guest Post – The Infopreneur
10 W ays to Use Google Buzz for SEO & SEM – SEOptimise
The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor – Social Media Today
5 Twitter Management Tools You Can’t Live Without – Social Media Today
How To Beat Procrastination – Jimi Jones
10 More Easy Blog Post ideas – Tycoon Blogger
Digg Digg a SocialMedia Book marking and voting plugin for WordPress.
Feb 27th
Over the last few months I have been in search of a way to add voting tools to the blog post automatically and still look good. As most know if you want to add a Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Blog Engage and many other buttons there is a plugin for it. The issues I came across is, they were all different sizes and generally hurt the flow of the text or images. As a designer, I see this as a design flaw. So I tried to manually inserting the code in myself or not adding all of the voting tools. As I learned more about marketing and social media, I realized how important these tools can be to your site. So after some research I came across a plugin for WordPress called Digg Digg. This plugin integrates Digg, Reddit,dZone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme (twitter), fbshare(facebook), Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious and, Sphinn and puts these buttons into WordPress content post.
After installing, you have variety of configurations you can setup using Digg Digg. The best part is, if you configure it right all the icons will flow nicely with your layout. Since Blog Engage and MMO Social Network voting was not part of Digg Digg Plugin, I set those to align right before the content. Since the Dig and Facebook buttons are larger than my vote buttons to left, I used the compact versions of Digg, Google Buzz, and Face book and aligned to the left before the content. I then added the Reddit Vote button, TweetMeMe, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Sphinn it buttons aligned left using full size buttons since several of the buttons did not have compact buttons. As for the rest of the marking system, I turned off, but if I ever become active with these sites, I can always add them.
As of February 20th, 2010 DiggDigg added Google Buzz Buttons. You have an option to use a compact version or the regular size button. For my site I will be removing my manually coded button to use this button.
The configuration is simple, only four configuration steps and your up and running Digg Digg. It only took about five minutes to configure and another five or ten minutes to decide on the layout, and what icons I wanted to use.
Configuration
The first thing you need to do is download and install the plugin through the admin panel. After the plugin is installed and activated, you will need to tell Digg Digg where to display the icons. Once the buttons locations is set, you will need to design if you want the icons to line up horizontally or vertically. For the fourth step you will need to tell Digg Digg what buttons to setup. When you are selecting which buttons to use, you will at this time tell where each button will go. Such as, before the content, after the content, float right, float left, or none. You will also need to decide on the style of the icons. Some of the buttons have a compact version as well as the normal size one. The final part in the step is to set the weight of each button. By weight I mean where in line will the icon be placed. Larger the number the more important the icon is and it will be placed first. The final step is to configure TweetMeMe by entering the ReTweet name. The print screens below is how I currently have Digg Digg I have set.
Daily Delicious Links Feb 26th
Feb 26th
Today’s links are for online training resources, Adobe Photoshop brushes and new blogging tool called Zemanta. If you looking for some new blogging and design resources check out these links.
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Software Training.
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Adobe Brushes. Huge Collection of Fract of Abstract, fractals and glow brushes.
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Zemanta is a revolutionary new platform for accelerating on-line content production for any web user. Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta, which recognizes all contextual content. Zemanta then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results to the user to enrich and inform their content. What’s more, Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.
News Update: LeapFish is Integrated with Topsy
Feb 26th
Yesterday LeapFish search engine announced that they are integrating with Topsy. LeapFish is a real-time search engine that allows users access to live news, video and images in real time. Now that LeapFish has been integrated with Topsy, LeapFish has access to the Twitter stream, it can find the most popular links that are shared in displays them to the user in real-time.
As you can see from the images (please click on the screen shot to see full size and clearer (sorry)) that they have intregrated Twitter and Facebook into your home page. I then did a search on Evolutionary Designs and in the second print screen you see that the first findings are from the search engine. What is cool about this part of the search is you have the option to choose what search results you want to look at. You have the choice of looking at Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In the second part of the search results you can see the Twitter Tweets that mention Evolutionary Designs.
Daily Delicious Links Feb 25th 2010
Feb 25th
Earlier today I came across an article on Lifehacker about Inbox2 Desktop. The Inbox2 is a system that combines all your message into a single, synchronized application that is accessible everywhere. The email platform allows you to add your existing email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Exchange) or any custom IMAP/POP3 accounts and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Hyves, Yammer, Twitter) in one application.
After reading this article, I am interested in the system. I will setup an account and see if I like it. Once I know more I will give it a review.
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“Windows: Like its original webapp, the Inbox2 beta for Windows does a great job of combining your email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social messages into one sortable stream. It also respects your email labels and stars and adds simple task management tools.”
News Update: Yahoo partners with Twitter to boost social features
Feb 25th
Earlier this week Yahoo said that they will be integrating with Twitter. Now Yahoo users will be able to view the 140-character Tweets created by Twitter users directly within Yahoo sites. They will also be able to Tweet their own messages without leaving Yahoo. For the complete news article follow the link, Yahoo partners with Twitter to boost social features
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