Timothy Allard

Twitter Search API And jSON Callbacks

Over the weekend I integrated a Twitter Profile Search Tool in my blog using the Twitter API and the jSON callback functions. What it does, is let you search Twitter profiles right from my blog, and display their latest Tweets. I have full control over the number of tweets to display, the amount to show, and more. The Twitter API and jSON functions are very cool, and this is only the beginning to what can be done with it. I started with a search tool because it is a very practical thing to make. Let's dissect it a bit to see how it was done.

First off, what is the Twitter API, and what can I do with it? Well simply put, Twitter exposes some of its functionality via an Application Programming Interface (API). This allows us so to some cool things with it, like my Twitter Profile Search Tool.

Lets get dirty. There are a few things that must be included to get this to function correctly. Here is a quick overview. We need to have a search field and button to submit, lets use "user" as the search fields name. We then need to place < ?php $user = $_GET['user']; ? > high up on our code. This will grab the variable $user to send through the API and jSON, giving us the profile we would like to search.

Inside the form action we need to do method="GET" and action="&user=". This will add the variable user to the URL and encode it to manipulate the data. Next we need to include an element with an ID called "twitter_update_list" I chose to use an Unordered List. jSON will look for this ID and know where to place the called data.

We are just about done, here is the last chunk of code. < ?php echo " "; ? > I converted the last javascript line to PHP because I wanted to make it dynamic. You see how there is "$user.json?" typicly in a static call, $user would be an actual profile name. But since I wanted to make it a dynamic call and enable the user to search for themselves, I added the profile name a variable. The last part to this is to change count to the number you want to display. 20 = 20 Tweets.

View iPad Formatted Websites In Firefox - TRICK

So the iPad has launched, and you do not have one. This quick little trick will let you view iPad formatted websites in your browser just as though you had one. You only need 3 things. The first is Firefox. The second is the "User Agent Switcher" plugin for firefox. This will allow you to switch your browsers user agent, so you can view alternative views of web pages specifically for a device with that user agent profile. Lastly, you will need the user agent line of text located below.

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

Install the User Agent plugin and create a new user agent profile. Paste in this code and switch to that profile. Next try and go to a website and see which one loks diferent. The website that made me want to try this was for GMAIL. Google just released a very slick looking new iPad formatted website specificly for that device. by going to gmail, it auto detects and thinks I am now using an iPad and displays the page as so. I would honestly love a view format like this for the web version of Gmail. It would be nice if they offered a view like this for web. In the meantime, I may just use an iPad user agent.

I was slightly disappointed as it did not look exactly as it the picture, but it was very cool none the less. Check it out, test some sites and let me know how it goes. Did you find a cool website?

Google Annotations For Analytics - What You Need To Know

Google just released some updates to Google Analytics and boy are they useful. Having used Google Analytics from private beta, I realized there was one feature missing which could be very useful in reporting - and it was released today. Have you ever ran a campaign for your website or started some marketing promotion and wonder why there was a huge traffic spike 3 months down the line? Google Analytics Annotations can solve that. You can now create custom labels and annotate throughout your accumulating web traffic data. This is very useful right off the bat, lets take a closer look.

Let's say we have a budget for this quarter for $5,000. We start an AdWords campaign and launch it on December 8th. We can go into our graphs and mark this. "5k AdWords". It doesn't end here. You could label things as: "got story on digg", "picked up by fark", "city posters", "twitter promotion started" the list goes on.

How can you add an annotation? It's simple. Any place that shows an "over-time" graph in Google Analytics, allows you to add one. simply click the little tabbed arrow below the chart and fill in your note. Annotations can be public (visible to anyone who has access to this data) or private (only available to your user account who has access to the data).

This is a really simple but powerful feature added to Google Analytics and everyone can start using it today. There will be no more guessing as to why there was a huge increase, or decrease in web traffic. Are you using GA Annotations? If so let me know how you like it.

How To Install Chrome OS With A USB Drive

Ok, so last night I was able to boot up my Gateway netbook into Chrome OS and here is what I found. This guide will help you get set up in under 15 minutes. There are 6 steps to do this and if you are very eager to get Chrome os on your computer to play with, then this is a great tutorial to experiment with.

What you need: Download Chrome OS Torrent, Download IMG Extractor,Format USB Drivem, Copy To USB Drive, Change Boot Order, Boot In Chrome

Right now, there are two options to get Chrome OS on your netbook. the first option is to download VMWare and run it as a virtual machine through Windows 7, Vista, or XP. This option tends to be slow, kind of annoying and everything has to be done through a window. The other option is to put it on a USB stick and boot up from the drive. I chose the last option, the USB stick and this is how i got Chrome OS on my netbook.

First what you need to do is download the Chrome OS developer torrent, which is about 300mbs. Once downloaded, unzip the file, and you will be left with an image file (img). This image file contains the goods. Next we need to download a special IMG extractor which will automatically copy it to the USB drive. Next, get your USB stick and format it to NTFS. First make sure you back up everything on the drive if there is anything on it. You can format the drive by going to “My Computer”, find the drive, right click and click “format”. This should bring up a dialog where you can name the drive, and then check off quick format. Once that is done click format. The process should only take about 1 minute depending on what was on the USB previously.

Now we are ready, just to confirm, we have our IMG file, the IMG extractor and we also have our freshly formatted USB drive.

Pop in the USB drive and open up the IMG extractor. We need to do two things now - browse to the img file and also determine what drive letter the USB drive is, and use the dropdown to set it. This way the extractor will know where to place the files. If you do not know what drive letter the USB stick is you can go to “My Computer” and it will say it there.

Once you browsed to the IMG file, and the drive letter is changed, click “extract”. This should take a minute or two.

Once complete you now will have a fresh copy of Chromium OS on your USB drive! Now all you have to do is one last step and you will be on your way to booting in Chrome.

Restart your computer and get into the BIOS. Don’t be scared, we just need to make one quick change to the boot startup. Depending on your type of computer, it may vary, but mine was F2. Press F2 over and over again, before the Windows logo screen appears. A DOS looking screen should appear and unsing the arrow keys navigate to “boot”. This screen has a list of boot options and the order they should run. Make sure you have the USB stick as number one. This means it will look for the USB stick first, then check to see if an operation system is installed on a hardrive. Save and exit.

Your computer should now restart and a blue Chromium OS should appear with two fields, for a username and password. Make sure you have a plugged ethernet connection as wireless is not currently enabled.

But that is it! Let me know your thoughts, how your experience was. How you feel about this and more!

JQuery UI - What A Beauty

OK. So, i’m really liking the JQuery UI set. What is it exactly? “jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.”

Let me tell you it is beautiful. You first need the JQuery Core. You can download and customize a dynamic zip file just to your specific needs. I downloaded the whole package and threw it up on my server so I could build what ever I wanted.

One of my favorite UI items are the dialog box, date picker, and progress bar.

Sassy. OK. How hard is it to implement? Not very. You just declare a couple functions and set a couple variables and bam! you have a dialog.

I will post some pictures within the next couple days to showcase some work I have done using the JQuery Core framework.

Bottom line - if you really want to snazz up a project, with little coding, but a powerful framework, JQuery is a big recommendation. Has anyone else done anything with JQuery? I would love to see your work.

Getting Started With Google AdSense A Guide For Beginners

Another one of my “in-progress” projects is my AdSense eBook for beginners. It goes from start to finish on how to set up AdSense on your website, and start to bring in some extra cash.This is a real time consuming project and hope to have it complete by April 2011. It will be available to download directly from my website, for a price still yet to be determined. But it will be under $10.00, (hint, probably $9.99). It is focused for beginners, but definitely can be useful to anyone at any level.

Some highlights are: Full vocabulary list and dictionary, Heatmap of most common click areas on websites, working with channels and blending, best ad placements on websites, blogs, forums and more. One of the most comprehensive sections of the eBook will be the 100 most popular questions asked by AdSense users.

If you have a link on MyDentify (My Business Directory) you will get a discount on the eBook sale. I’ll definitely keep you updated on my projects. My eBook has made progress, It just needs a little more work.

How to Monetize Your Website

If you could run a website of your own and have an income stream to cover your domain and hosting fees would that make your day? How about if that same income stream increased over time along with your sites growth and you started making $100.00 a week from it. As the more traffic you brought to your website, the more your income increased to even $100.00 a day. Got your attention yet? Im not trying to sell you anything, or get you to try my product, because I don’t have one. Im just giving some insight into how Im using the internet to monetize my websites.

Having a variety of income streams is best because if something were to go wrong with your only stream and you rely on it to survive then you will have a problem. But thats a different topic entirely. You can read my “Dont Put All Your Eggs in One Basket” post to learn more. I use a variety of things to send income my way, I try to be as creative as possible and have it require the least amount of effort. With my main stream,..its basically effortless. Well effortless as in once I have it ready to go in my website. I use Google AdSense as one of my main sources of income. Google AdSense is one of the most popular services out there where you can embed a few lines of code to display ads related to the content of your page. If somebody clicks on that advertisement, you get paid because you referred somebody to their website.

But I like my color palette, will the ads look weird?
AdSense ads are very customizable, you can even see one to the right of this page. Im using a 160×600 skyscraper. It could also be customized to be other sizes and colors. But all I did was embed one snippet of JavaScript and it does the rest automatically. But is it really that simple? In essence yes, but to have it optimized for best performance then it takes a little more work. But you get the idea. Google will pay a publisher monthly if they can earn $100.00 or more. If you dont make it in that one month, they will send it once you do. To be honest its a really cool system they have going.

But how much will this earn me?
There are many factors that Google takes into consideration when determining the click value, most factors are for Google’s eyes only. But some are proven to be true like placing your ads in the “hot spots” of a web page, or above the fold, etc. One other major factor is the keyword that is being targeted to show the relevant ads. For instance content on home mortgages will be worth more of a click value than a website on Pokemon Cards, because the market for competition is much higher and business are competing for clicks. On average people can get paid anywhere from $0.2c to over $1.00! Now thats cool. I have a little formula I created which is common sense but very simple. More traffic = more clicks = more money. The more traffic you get, the more chances you have for someone to click on those banners. Thus generating more income for your website. Now like I said before, once you insert the code all you do is sit back and watch the money come it.

Is AdSense really worth it?
I would definitely say yes. It has proven to me to be a successful source of income both short term and long term. You can monitor your click through rates, impressions and so on. The feeling of knowing you are successfully running a website and profiting off it is a feeling of success and it can only get better if you stick with it. Thats why once you get into AdSense you develop both long term and short term goals to constantly raise the bar to be as successful as possible.

Are there other ways to make money?
Of course there is. You can do link submission, banner advertising on a per customer basis, referral programs and many other various forms of website monetization. I like to use a variety, not only because its safer, but I can get exposed to new services out there that I could benefit from.