Update of automatic tweet plugin for Expression Engine

A while back I wrote about my plugin to automatically tweet about new blog posts in Expression Engine. Well, recently those of you who follow @f055 on Twitter might have observed that the announcement of my last blog post about Google Buzz was tweeted every couple of hours. That’s because there was a bug in my plugin.

Automatically tweet about new posts in Expression Engine using AutoTweet plugin

There are stuff machines should do for you, and one of them is tweeting about your latest blog post – because it’s important to spread the word. Today I will show you my Expression Engine (EE) plugin called AutoTweet that does just that. It’s simple and elegant and doesn’t require anything above typing in your Twitter credentials. So next time you see an auto-tweet about my post, please retweet it :)

rel=“canonical” and Expression Engine SEO

If you have read my previous two articles on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google-friendly links for Expression Engine (EE), then you know how important these tweaks are. They help with various things, duplicate content among them. Google recently introduced another tool to deal with that particular problem — canonical page tag. And there are a few places in Expression Engine where it works perfectly.

Make separate RSS feeds for each category in ExpressionEngine

It’s time to talk about ExpressionEngine (EE) for a change. If any of you can speak Polish, I recommend subscribing to EExpression.pl, a nice new site that talks about EE in my native language. Now, to the subject — let’s assume for a moment that you use the EE feed templates. If you are running a daily news site, there’s probably loads of different categories you are broadcasting. It would be nice if your readers could subscribe just to the topic they are interested in (on CNN you can), but without the need for you to create tons of separate feed templates. See how EE can do this task for you.

Display Twitter timeline in Expression Engine - Part 2

Last time I explained how to display your Twitter timeline in Expression Engine (EE) using a simple plugin. Today, I will show how to achieve the same and even more using Twitter timeline feed. This approach gives a bit more flexibility and some advantages over the method described in Part 1. We use it on ProcessOne website to push our CEO’s latest tweets.

Google-friendly SEO for Expression Engine

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a huge market, because frankly these days, if you’re not in the top search results, you barely exist. That’s why it’s a good practice to take some time time and properly prepare your pages, so that the GoogleBot, and others, will like them. Especially since it really takes just a few minutes in Expression Engine (EE).

Display Twitter timeline in Expression Engine - Part 1

You probably noticed on the right, there are my latest Twitter messages (you could follow me, too :). There are generally two ways to fetch tweets into Expression Engine (EE). One involves using a plugin to directly access your Twitter account and display messages. The other is about monitoring your feed (or any other, in fact) and pushing new messages to a special EE weblog. Today, I will focus on the first, simpler method.

Expression Engine Captcha vs Akismet

Spam sucks. It’s like the cancer of the Internet. Blogs are a major target, as the comments are a perfect way to propagate links, keywords and such. Fortunately, we have some ways to fight it. One of them is Captcha, funny looking images with text, that sometimes are so hard to read, they actually block 100% of interaction. The other is automatic spam detection based on services like Akismet. Both are available for Expression Engine (EE), but the latter seems better.

Expression Engine discussion forum - make a sticky topic

I just wanted to make a sticky out of one topic on the tweet.IM service discussion forum, and found that it’s ridiculously difficult to locate this option. After quick googling I have found the solution and I thought it would be better to highlight it in case I forget.

Expression Engine and Google friendly links

We all know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important. When I am looking for something on the web, I generally don’t ask around or look through link directories — I do a quick search on Google. So the higher something appears in the search list, the better for that page’s author. Cause I’m most likely to click that, not the one that is 20 pages later. Therefore, it is important how you present your content and how you link to it (because Google collects links and ranks the content). Expression Engine (EE) can’t do much about your content, but has by default, a very nasty, search-engine unfriendly way of creating links. Let’s fix it.