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Twitter This WordPress Plugin Review

Posted in: Social Media by Kuzzuk on March 20, 2009

Twitter This is a great Twitter plugin for WordPress written by Andres Artux Scheffer which can potentially make your blog posts or pages go viral on Twitter.

How Twitter This WordPress Plugin Works

1. The obvious first step is to install and activate the plugin on your WordPress blog.
2. Assuming that everything goes well with the installation and activation, the plugin will simply insert a small icon and a “Twitter This” link at the end of every blog post or page. When users click this link, the Twitter username and password fields are displayed which allows them to tweet the blog post or page.
3. If the user enters the correct Twitter username and password then the blog post or page title along with a shortened link is posted as a tweet otherwise an error is displayed.

Everything sounds really good so far but there are a few issues with the plugin. I know it is a free plugin so I shouldn’t be complaining too much but my main grouse is the lack of support for other languages. This is how it can be fixed.

No Language Support

The language used for the plugin is Spanish and I could surely add on a language file but that’s a little too techie for most people. The quick and dirty way to change the language is by directly editing the code. The good news is that editing the code is not difficult but the bad news is that you have to edit the code whenever there is an update to the plugin.

Edit the following plugin files.

twitter-this.php on line 89:
From: $html .= "Usuario: ...
To: $html .= "Twitter Username: ...

Post_to_twitter.php on line 94:
From: echo "Posteado en ...
To: echo "Posted on ...

Post_to_twitter.php on line 96:
From: echo "Error en Twitter, intentelo luego";
To: echo "Error posting on Twitter, please check your username and password";

Remember to back up before amending the files. The above changes should make the plugin workable on English language blogs. However, other limitations still exist but these are fortunately not deal breakers.

Coming Out Of The Closet

Posted in: General by Kuzzuk on March 17, 2009

Image Source: sxc.hu

I’m coming out of the closet regarding what I do for a living. Since I work from home, I get a lot of questions from people who ask me what I do for a living. I usually give them cryptic answers which leaves them more confused than convinced. It also makes me look shady as if I make money illegally. In fact, our real estate agent recently did ask “is what you do legal and do you have to pay taxes?”. Today, I’ve decided to come clean and tell everyone what I exactly do and yes it is legal and I do pay taxes.

• I work as an Internet Marketer and I guess I didn’t want to admit that because most people associate Internet Marketers with embarrassingly long sales letters with lots of highlighted parts and bullet points. I do not do that because I’m not a guru yet. Yet being the keyword here. What I do is help market other people’s products for a commission i.e. I’m an affiliate marketer. This blog will document my adventures in Internet Marketing which will mostly be tools, tips, ideas and opinions.
• I have been learning and using social media marketing techniques with very interesting results. It’s documented now that social networks are more popular than email so using it for your business is a wise decision. I admit that most of the social media I have used is to get back links (a pretty rudimentary but effective strategy) but as I’m learning more, I’ve started to realize the power of social media and how much I didn’t know. In this blog, I’ll document how marketers can use existing and upcoming social media tools as well as share any tools that I develop.
  Shameless plug: I’m developing a twitter tool which is like a viral squeeze page that can be used to exponentially add more followers. I’ll unveil this in a week or two.
• I run a number of content sites that make me money mainly via Google AdSense. It is not much but I like getting a 3 figure check every month from Uncle Google. I plan to build a few more authority sites (it is hard because most of the sites I have started failed) that’ll turn the current 3 figure check into a 4 figure one. That’s one of my goals for 2009.
• My bread and butter is still consulting and working on WordPress (mostly) and Joomla (rarely) projects. This is something I hope to do less and less in the future because I only get paid once for my efforts. I love getting paid many times for something I do once.

There you have it. It feels good to get this off my chest and now if anyone asks about what I do, I’ll simply point them to this post.

PS: I’m revamping my blog to focus on my adventures in working from home sharing tools, ideas and opinions.