Monthly Archives: July 2009

Is Ow.ly Framejacking?

The popular URL shortening service Ow.ly has recently come under fire on Twitter, and is being criticized for “framejacking.” (Framejacking is an unpleasant trick that was employed quite a lot in the late nineties, where someone would load others’ web pages into a frameset along with their own branding and ads. Example.)

I ask you, is what Ow.ly does bad?

Ow.ly Toolbar

How does this thin toolbar, as you can see above in the image, harm you or your website in any way? The bar is thin and unobtrusive. There are no paid ads, and the Ow.ly logo is tiny.

I argue that Ow.ly is useful to your social media-connected readers, and to you. The short URLs are easily shareable on Twitter, like any URL shorteners’, and the toolbar puts Tweet and Share buttons in easy reach, which can score you some retweets, Diggs, and Stumbles, which may lead to more traffic for you.

As a prolific Twitter user, when I read an interesting article, whether it be from Twitter or no, the first thing I do after is post it to Twitter. I have a handy bookmarklet that opens my desktop client (Tweetie) and dumps the link and page title into it. Not everyone has such a thing. People who enjoy Twittering, but aren’t quite as obsessed as I am, often use the Twitter.com web interface. Ow.ly’s convenient Tweet link makes posting an article a snap. Which saves the poster time, and it benefits the publisher.

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Regular Expression to Get All Image URLs From a Page

Have you ever wanted to, while working on some sort of PHP project, get an array listing of all the images used in a chunk of HTML? I’ve been planning out a web app over the past couple months, which will be doing a…

Twitter 101 for Business

Twitter is reaching out to businesses with a new guide, called Twitter 101 for Business, designed to help show the value that the microblogging can provide, in both customer relations and sales leads. Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and…

Get the Average Number of Comments Per Post in WordPress

Comments are often a good metric of how engaged your readers are. The more comments you get per post, the better you are doing as a blogger. If you get a high average of comments per post, then your readers are interesting in your…

Automattic WordPress Post Thumbnails

There are plenty of posts floating around the internet about using Custom Fields to assign thumbnail images to individual posts in WordPress. Web Developer Plus has a different idea. Do you often put images in your posts? You probably upload them through the media…

BlogBuzz July 25, 2009

Revenge of the DiggBar

You probably remember the controversy over Digg’s “DiggBar.” Marketed as a URL shortener integrated with Digg, with some other sharing options as well, it had a rough start because of a few technical and behavioral problems that web publishers weren’t too happy about. Well,…

Pods: A Plugin to Turn WordPress Into a Full CMS

WordPress is a good, lightweight CMS well-suited for any article-centric website. If you need a blog, a site with mainly static pages, or a combination, there’s no better software to use. However, WordPress isn’t necessarily the ideal tool for every job. Sometimes you need…

Getting RSS and Twitter Subscriber Counts in WordPress

I previously wrote a post about how some blogs are displaying their RSS subscriber and Twitter follower counts. Mac AppStorm is combining their Twitter and RSS counts into one number, and FreelanceSwitch has a section in their footer with separate readouts for RSS, Twitter,…

TechCrunch Posts Leaked Twitter Documents, Twitter Not Happy

Last Thursday, TechCrunch posted a multitude of proprietary information belonging to Twitter. Some 300 confidential documents arrived in the tech blog’s inbox the prior Tuesday, from someone known as “Hacker Croll.” The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules,…