Dear Aunt TUAW,

I read Uncle Steve's write-up about posting an iWeb site to a Dropbox folder.

It's a great blog post and neat trick! But it's using the Public folder... Is there a way to use a non-public folder to do the same?

Your loving nephew,

Seb

Dear Seb,

Auntie is fond of Kissr.co, not just because of its name, of course, but because it makes setting up a website on Dropbox super easy.

Just register for a name, and use Uncle Steve's save-from-iWeb secret techniques, and boom, you'll have a full website running from your Dropbox in no-time. If you want a custom domain, Kissr offers those for a small charge.

If you're more interested in wikis than blogs, take a look at WikiPack. It's a markdown-powered Wiki service that also serves from Dropbox. (And Uncle Brett consulted on the project!)

Auntie has tried both services (albeit, just poking around, no serious testing) and both seem to offer practical, portable, usable solutions.

Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: How do I post a website on Dropbox? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 23 May 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Did you know that out of the projected 106.7 million people who will own a smartphone this year, 94% of them will have access to the internet?

Today, people are buying and browsing content on mobile phones more than ever before.

Businesses are stepping up their mobile presence and trying to better engage this massive mobile upsurge.

Large and small businesses alike, there’s simply no ignoring the fact that mobile is a HUGE part of how we do online business. It may even take over completely sooner than we think…

That leads me to ask you this: What have you done to prepare your business for your mobile audience?

A Possible Solution: Responsive Design

Do you know what responsive design is? In a nutshell, it’s a design that will adjust and react to the width of the device it’s being loaded on (with the intention of better serving content to mobile viewers).

While responsive design has some drawbacks in terms of page optimization, it can undoubtedly improve the way your readers experience your site on mobile devices (as opposed to desktop computers or laptops).

That aside, people asked us to make Thesis responsive, and so we did.

The Responsive Skin + Child Theme Starter Set for Thesis (and it’s all yours, free)

Thesis allows you to conquer search engines, load your site fast, and design your own custom skin. Now, you can have a taste of mobile, too.

Ever since Matt released the starter skin and child theme templates, I’ve been working out the best way to make Thesis responsive and look better on mobile devices.

And I think I cracked it

By downloading this skin set, you get the framework for an ideal Thesis skin or child theme (thanks to Matt’s handy work), and you’ll also have a responsive version of Thesis right out of the box!

The best part is, you aren’t limited by the layout you choose. Create 1, 2, or 3 columns, change their widths and flip the column order around…it still stays responsive!

If you want to get an idea, go ahead and check out this demo I’ve set up, then start resizing your window (or browse on your smartphone!). You’ll notice that as your browser window gets smaller, the layout of Thesis will start to adapt.

This is the same framework I used to build my latest Thesis skin, and I’ll be using it on my future Thesis projects, too.

And now you can make it a part of your own projects as well. You can download the starter skin below, or if you develop child themes, scroll down a little to download:

To install the starter skin, be sure to have a fresh install of the latest version of Thesis.

Then via FTP, upload the custom_functions.php and custom.css files you got in the download into your /custom folder located in root/wp-content/themes/thesis_184 (overwriting the old files). Then, re-save your settings in the Thesis options panel, and you’re set!

…or, if you want to develop a child theme, download this:

To install the starter child theme, be sure to have a fresh install of the latest version of Thesis.

Now, login to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Appearance → Themes → Upload, then upload the “Responsive-Starter-Child-Theme.zip” file. Then, re-save your settings in the Thesis options panel, and you’re set!

Show-Off Your Responsive Site

Do you already have a responsive site using Thesis? Have you made something cool with these skin sets? Be sure to show your site off by leaving a comment below!

About the Author: Alex Mangini is an 18 year old Thesis designer and founder of Kolakube. He makes killer Thesis skins, and thinks you'll have fun creating stellar landing pages and optin forms with his latest Thesis skin: Marketers Delight.

Posted by evolvingSEO

Or do you find yourself feeling a bit like Gary Coleman...

He is talking about WordPress, yes?

If you've ever tried to optimize WordPress for SEO success you've probably said those exact words at some point... some crazy theme breaks something, or a plugin crashes the whole site, or in terms of SEO you get 971 duplicate pages back from your crawl report. 

But I don't think your troubles with WordPress are your fault entirely. I've been there too when I was first learning it! Gary Coleman has been there. But this post is an opportunity to move on from that...

Let's Wipe That Gary Coleman Look Off Your Face!

There's a lot of well meaning yet misguided info out there. After over two years of battling with (umm... using...) WordPress, I know it can be tricky and frustrating at times, and so I wanted to create a guide that might help clear some of this up.

I'm not here to get into every single little detail and variation, but rather to spend time on the core WordPress features and give special focus on SEO related WordPress issues.

Five Goals of This Post

1. Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminology
2. Explain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in "relational database") - and explain those relationships
3. Show you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focus
4. Give you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz's crawler diagnostics with other sources
5. Get rid of that 'ol Gary Coleman look!

For This Post, Let's Assume

• We're running wordpress.org (the self hosted version)
• This is a single author site (to keep it simple, although not hard to extend the concepts to multi-author)
• We're not doing any ecommerce, photo galleries, or anything else you'd find in a more custom application of WordPress.
• We're using Yoast's SEO for WordPress plugin.

Alright. Everyone ready? LET'S GO!! ....What Chu TALKIN' Bout WordPress?!

Part 1 - WordPress Terminology

• Explanation of some of the most common terms

Regular Web "Page" vs. WordPress "Page"

Let's get really basic here for a minute, hope you don't mind. But I think a lot of people may confuse/interchange a WordPress page with a Web Page.

A web page is a single HTML document that exists at a unique URL. Even if the extension is .php or .asp. The underlying source code is still HTML. This is a WEB page. It does not matter HOW it was created - it loads in your browser as an HTML document and that's all you need to know. And for the rest of this post, when I say "web page" I'm talking about any HTML document existing at a URL.

But a WordPress page is WordPress's version of a "static" page. In fact, anytime you're talking about a page in the context of WordPress, put the word "static" before "page" = "static page" and it will always make more sense.

Pages vs. Posts

This is the second thing people either usually confuse, or have a hard time grasping. To your credit, I think it's confusing that they're put side by side in documentation, as if they're somehow similar. They're not at all!

Note that pages and posts differ entirely in how they function.

• A post is dated and "time-sensitive" and a page is not.
• A post can belong to categories, tags, dates and authors and a page can not.
• You can access a post from multiple pages - its category, tag, date or author.
• A page is only accessible from where ever you link to it.

Some additional references about pages vs. posts:

• wordpress.com documentation (although not the self hosted version, still applies)
• wordpress codex about pages
• wordpress codex "the dynamic nature of pages"

Categories vs. Tags

Ah. Another sticky point for folks. Some may argue, but I think Yoast would agree. Categories are for your main 5-7 "buckets" of topics that your posts fall into. Tags are there to fine-tune categories, and are usually much more specific that categories.

• Also, you should NOT have a category that is the same as a tag or vice versa. Categories should all be unique from tags.
• And, categories can have hierarchy and tags have no hierarchy.

Author Archives

• Simple. Me like.

Dated Archives

• Easy. Good.

Pagination (Subpages)

Yeah... why is this confusing? The only thing that doesn't paginate... are PAGES!!  ....WHAT CHU TALKIN' BOUT??'

Part 2 - Relationships In WordPress

• This part will show you how the different elements within WordPress relate and interact with one another.

Pages - They're Static

Not much to 'splain here (I hope by now!).

• Pages are like regular, non-blog pages on a website.
• They can have a hierarchy.
• They will not go into the RSS feed.

Use Pages For The Following Types Of Content

• An "About Us" section
• If a dentist, say a page about "dental implants" describing your service.
• If a restaurant, your Menu Page.
• Directions page
• Fees page etc.

Posts->Categories

Think of "Many To Many" relationships in databases. 

• You can put a post in many categories. And of course a category can hold many posts.

Posts->Tags

• You can put the same tag on many posts.

Date & Author Archives

• Dates are simple. If you view a date archive by month, all the posts from that month appear within that date archive.
• For our single author blog setup, since every single posts is by the same author, that's what you'd get when viewing that archive (which is why we 301 redirect it to the blog homepage).

Accessing Posts

• This is showing you, you can arrive at the same post from multiple places.

• And this is showing you, for the most recent posts, or popular posts, sometimes there is a link in the sidebar - and of course the blog home IS a feed of the most recent posts.

Don't Forget Pagination (Subpages)!

• All of these web pages can have subpages off of them.

Bonus - For the Truly Geeky

I found this awesome template of the hierarchy within WordPress and loading a page. Not necessary to know for what we're doing here, and not 100% relevant either, but I found it really useful, especially if you like to know more about what's going on behind the scenes.

Part 3 - Best Practice Configuration

Any Decisions I Need To Make Up Front?

This is sort of a "I wish I knew then" chart. Things that would be useful to know up front, such as;

• Decide your categories at the beginning.
• Decide what you want the homepage of your blog to be early on.
• When you create a user account, choose the username wisely, because this is the URL and can not be changed afterwards (don't get stuck with "admin"!)

What Should Be Accessible To Users & Search Engines?

• This chart is showing you what page types should be accessible to the user and to the search engines.
• So unless otherwise noted, the page type can be indexed and followed.

What Links Go In What Menus?

This is the general rule of thumb I follow for deciding what links to put where. In general

• I put pages and categories in main menus
• I put categories, recent/popular posts, dated archives, and maybe tags in the sidebar/widget.

Where Do I Control URLs Titles & Descriptions?

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called "slugs".

• Page and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editor
• Category and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under "slug"
• Author URLs are the "username"

If you've got everything set up correctly, it should be EASY to get your titles and descriptions in check.

• Title and description templates get set in Yoast
• Titles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in that page/post editor with Yoast.
• Need help writing a title? Use this post I did about writing titles.

Actual Setup

Themes

This is where things get tricky, because a lot of themes tend to break perfectly good WordPress install. Or they try to handle SEO stuff when they shouldn't. Or, you get a theme, and a plugin and WordPress all handling title tags and it becomes a mess.

DO use themes for design elements;

• Colors
• Fonts,
• Page layout
• Headers
• Footers
• Basic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

• Indexation
• Analytics codes
• Titles and descriptions
• RSS feeds
• Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes. 

Plugins

There are two plugins I always install right away for pure SEO stuff;

• Yoast SEO for WordPress
• Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress

I often see other plugins that try to set SEO settings - so be sure you're only managing SEO with one thing!

Configuring Yoast SEO

Titles & Descriptions

• Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive - so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don't forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the 'sitename' variable - this is the site title under settings>general

Indexation

• This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.
• Please note: Want to reiterate - this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup - one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.
• Also - if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

• Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.
• I like letting users browse posts in the dated archives
• Not best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page - but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

XML Sitemaps

• Make sure you don't have any other plugins or your theme handling the sitemap.
• Check off what you don't want included in the XML sitemap. (This is usually the same as what you are NOT indexing).

Permalinks

• One thing I LOVE about Yoast's plugin - you can strip /category/ off the folder structure for categories. AWESOME! You should definitely do this. If the site has already been indexed with /category/ redirects are automatically created.
• You could redirect images to their parent post or page. I usually don't but it won't do any harm if you do.
• Unless you're running something with https (secure pages) you can just leave canonical settings as default.

Part 4 - Diagnostics

This is THE most common question we get in Q&A. Duplicate content issues. Basically I want to give you guys some extra tools and resources for checking duplicate content issues re: WordPress and the Moz crawl report.

A lot of folks get concerned when they see "47 duplicate page titles found" etc, and with understanding!

If you've set everything up as above correctly, there isn't a whole lot of room for error. But sometimes things happen and stuff breaks or we miss something.

And most times, no matter the issue, ensuring you have things setup as described above in the post, will fix things.

Step 1 - Check Google Webmaster Tools

Check webmaster tools. If they are not reporting duplicate page titles or descriptions, you probably have little to worry about. Moz might have picked up on pages that were crawlable but not being indexed. But definitely check back in with webmaster tools in a week or so (its healthy to check webmaster tools once a week anyway!)

Step 2 - Crawl With Screaming Frog

I honestly love the Moz crawl report. Its turned up some important things to fix for me at times. Yet I think its just smart with ANY tool to cross check, especially if it involves a big error like duplicate content.

Use the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl up to 500 pages (and the paid version is unlimited).

1. Crawl the site
2. Click on titles
3. Select Duplicates
4. You'll see a report like this:

In this case we can clearly see subpages are causing a lot of the duplicate title issues. 

Step 3 - Use Google Queries To See What's Indexed

Just because a crawler like Screaming Frog or the SEOmoz crawler crawls pages, does not mean they are indexed. Check Google's index to find out with these queries.

• site:mydomain.com/blog - check for blog indexation
• site:mydomain.com/category - check for category indexation (unless you've stripped from folder structure)
• site:mydomain.com/tag - check to see what tags are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/author - check to see if author archives are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/2012 - check to see what dated archives from 2012
• site:mydomain.com/ inurl:page - check for subpages being indexed (see example below)

Steps To Take If You Confirm Errors

If you also find errors in webmaster tools, screaming frog, or Google's index:

1. Identify which page type it is (category, tag, dated archive, author archive, or subpages)
2. Determine if the page should be indexed to begin with.
3. If it should be indexed, make sure you have a setting in WordPress to generate unique titles/descriptions from the template.
4. If it should NOT be indexed, block it using Yoast and be sure you don't have to do any 301 redirects

I know that's a little overly simplistic - it'd be tough to cover every possible variation of errors within this post - but that general framework is what I would advise to follow.

Part 5 - Do The Gary Coleman Dance

No seriously. I know WordPress can be challenging - but I hope this guide has helped give you a better understanding of its different functions, and how to resolve some common issues on your own.

I will answer some questions...

Got questions? If you lead them with "What chu talkin' bout!?" I'll answer (within reason - only short 3-4 sentence answers possible here). NO specific site questions here please, just general concept questions.

Please take any detailed or site-specific questions on over to the Moz Q&A.

Or... ask me questions at MozCon! That's right, I'll be at MozCon, as an attendee, so if you're there you can track me down and ask away!

Thhhannnnnks!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

iPhone unlocks are usually a tetchy experience – you have to have the right firmware on the right model iPhone at the right time. Now, however, thanks to a method that spoofs the activation server, you can unlock almost any iPhone semi-permanently.

The system, called Subscriber Artificial Module or SAM, requires a jailbroken iPhone and Cydia. To run it, you de-activate your phone, insert a new SIM, and then activate SAM. SAM spoofs the activation process, convincing the phone that it has been unlocked properly and without issues.

Built by hackers Loktar_Sun and Laforet, the process isn’t for the faint of heart and it takes twenty-eight steps. You can follow along at iClarified where they’ve outlined the entire process in meticulous detail.

Because you’re not really unlocking the phone but in fact activating it using an unsupported SIM, expect some wonky server issues. You will also have to go back and reactivate the device later if you decide to switch SIMs. It’s a small price to pay for freedom.

Posted by gfiorelli1

When it comes to the Internet, I imagine it as the warehouse where the Ark is archived at the end of Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Ark is that outstanding content someone has produced and that no other will be able to see again, because it is forgotten and hidden between gazillions of other contents.

Apart from the gigantic volume of pages present in the Internet, for a long time, search spam has been making the discovery of reliable sources difficult; and – let's be honest – Social Media has enhanced this issue, because it added even more noise and dispersion. Actually, as Mitchel Kapor said once, getting information off the Internet is like having a drink from a fire hydrant.

To tell the truth, this problem is not new.

What is Content Curation?

1. Aggregation, which consists in curating the most relevant content about a topic into one single location. This is the most common way of curating content, and it is at the base of the majority of the content curation services actually present online;
2. Distillation, which purpose is to distill the overall noise about a topic to its most important and relevant concept. The best cases of social content curation can be catalogued into this definition;
3. Elevation, when curators draft a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings;
4. Mashups, or to merge different content about a topic creating a new original point of view of the same;
5. Chronology, which could be defined as historiographical content curation. Usually it consists in presenting a timeline of curated information to show the evolution of a particular topic.

How to do Content Curation: The Tools

The Discovery Phase and Tools

Actually there are a very large number of sites and tools that help the content curation process, but none is useful without one essential skill: your ability in separate the wheat from the chaff.

That means that at first a curator needs to collect all the information out there about the topic he is going to curate and, then, start selecting.

The best way to collect that information is listening. For instance, if someone would like to start curating the SEO topic, he should have to start visiting on a daily basis sites like SEOmoz, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and Search Engine Journal, examining the sites/blogs of the people active in those sites, select the objectively most interesting ones, and use two starting tools, RSS and Twitter:

• RSS to track their own content production about the SEO topic;
• Twitter to track the content related to the SEO industry they share.

This discovery phase can be facilitated by tools, two of which – sign ‘o’ times - are not strictly web based but mobile apps:

• Zite

​Zite (for iOs, WebOS and, very recently, for Android too and owned by CNN), is a “Personalized magazine”, which not only offers the opportunity to connect your Google Reader, Twitter and Read it Later accounts in order to have all the content present there in just one place and organized into sections, but also it proposes a large selection of content from other sources it crawled in Internet, and all this content is presented in standard sections like Technology, Politics, Arts & Culture, etc.

You can also add sections based on your specific needs/interests thanks to a sort of “search suggest box”. For instance, I have personalized it with very specific sections dedicated to Content Marketing, Content Management, Copywriting, and all those disciplines that can be included in the Inbound Marketing umbrella.

The “magic” is that with a simple rule of thumbs up/down you can teach Zite which content is the one you really consider relevant and what not. So the next time you access it, the content proposed will be closer to the one you are really interested in. For a curator, this is like having a robotic personal assistant.

• Flipboard

Flipboard, (for iOS only, sorry), is another “social magazine”, which can be personalized not only by selecting which sites to be republished on our Flipboard and we want to read the content of, but also from an interesting curators’ list and – especially - adding a bigger number of social accounts we subscribe to: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, 500px, and obviously, Google Reader.

• Strawberry Jam

This tool is still in beta (you need to ask for an invitation directly to the site from someone already using it), and it is an almost perfect tool in order to discover what is the most popular content which is published in your stream, for a keyword or for a hashtag and those Twitter lists you may have added.
This is especially useful for three reasons:

1. When you log in Strawberry Jam, it syncs with your Twitter account and shows you all the popular links in the previous 24 hours. This is an amazing way to discover what happened when you weren’t online (i.e.: consider my case, living in Europe and sleeping when the Twitter activity is having its peaks in the USA);
2. It facilitates the selection of those links, which are useful and interesting for those searches
3. (keywords and hashtag, especially) which can be really due a loss of time.

Other tools that can be used for this discovery phase are:

• Evri (for iOs and Kindle Fire), which has the advantage of owning an API which allows to access the data of your Evri “entity” or channels from their site.
• Feedly (for iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox), the plus is having browser versions which are always in sync with the mobile apps.
• Factiva (by Dow Jones), a great resource for discovering very authoritative news content.
• My6sense (iOS). This app – apart the classic functionalities of a tool like this – has a very good engine, which is able to understand your tastes and, the more you use it, to present them at the first place. It offers an API for third party development.
• PostPost. It is focused just on Twitter, but it offers the very appreciated function of breaking the content shared in your stream into a faceted navigation (links, photos, videos…) and ordered by priority: First the content from those contacts you interact the most, secondly the content most shared and cited in your stream and, finally, all the rest.
• Delicious, especially now that is starting the implementation of some of the characteristics that made Trunk.ly, which it bought months ago, so popular.
• Faveous, which can be considered a Delicious on steroids. In fact, it can also collect those links you share in Gmail.
• Inbound.org, Hacker News, and any other content curated news site. These sites are a great shortcut to find out valuable content and, even more importantly, other curators specialized in one or two specific topics. In particular, Inbound.org, with its very well thought categorization of the RSS sources, helps considerably the further skimming of the content published.

The Content Curation discovery phase is an ongoing activity, and of every source we should save its RSS in our reader if it's possible in order to commit several useful SEO actions.

The Production Phase and Tools

In the last couple of years, the tools available to content curators literally invaded the web. Some are right now all the hype and have partly changed its nature (Pinterest anyone?), and others have a great user base in the content marketing field, but are less known to SEO and/or Social Media marketers.

Below I will list and describe just those ones that personally I consider the most interesting. It is a very personal selection, so forgive me if I miss some tool (but I invite you to add more in the comments).

My criteria of selection is the following:

• Overall quality of the product;
• Quality of the curators using it and publishing their curated content with it;
• Effectiveness of the content curated publication in the product site;
• Opportunity of publishing the content curated with the tool on our own site (via embed, RSS, widget or API).

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is probably the best site for Content Curation right now.

Even though it offers several ways to share on your social sites and to embed on your site the content you curate in your Scoop.it magazine, it is mainly meant to be used as an external property.

The final product is a magazine, where it is possible to publish content suggested by the Scoop.it suggestion engine, from the sources you have set up, from its bookmarklet, and from the other curators you are following on site itself.

The overall quality of the curators present in Scoop.it is quite high, even though you must dig to find the very remarkable ones. The system suggests users related to your topic. But if you desire to explore topics you’re not curating, the Scoop.it search system is not the best one.

As every content curation platform, Scoop.it offers the opportunity to republish your curated content on your site: via widget, which you can configure as you want, and via RSS feed. If you have a Wordpress blog (or a Tumblr) you can connect it with your topic page and republish your curated content there.

Scoop.it is a freemium product, and the free subscription is powerful enough for the average content curation needs. But if you want to use your brand, your own domain/subdomain and have analytics (and connect your magazine to Google Analytics), then you need to subscribe the Business plan.

For more insights about Scoop.it, read this post, which Gabriella Sannino published on Search Engine Journal, or this great guide by Chris Dyson on his blog.

Bundlr

Bundlr is a “clipper site”. Somehow, it is a Pinterest, but not limited to just images and videos. In fact with it you can clip and save in your bundles practically everything you find relevant about an argument: text clips, images, video, code snippets….

Bundlr, as any curation content tool, lets you share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ what you have clipped and to add your note commenting the clip. This is especially interesting for social content curation.

Moreover, the page can be curated by more than one curator or can be kept private if you are curating a topic for internal use only (both available in the pro version only).

Bundlr lets you embed your topic page in your own site too. The embed will get updated as constantly as you continue to clip new relevant quotes, images about your selected topic. Another way to embed a page in your site is via RSS.

Alternatives to Bundlr.com are:

• Snip.it, in beta and very Facebook oriented;
• Bagtheweb.com, which is a mix between Scoop.it and a clipper site. Its most interesting functionality is that you can create of network of “bags” in order to really create a deeper curated content experience about a topic and its subtopics;
• Clipboard, which offers the opportunity to embed (or share on socials or with a link) just one clip. For instance click this link
• (oh yes) Pinterest.

Storify

Storify fulfills perfectly the “Chronology” concept of Content Curation.

In fact, with it, it is possible to narrate a story aggregating the best content about the same topic from different sources, while commenting it and offering your own vision about the event presented, as this Storify by Charles Arthur about Sexism in the web marketing industry displays well.

For this reason, it is now widely used especially by journalists, but also by tweeps and bloggers, whose main topic are current news.
Surely it is a tool that many of you already know and, maybe, experimented, but if you have not tried it yet, I really suggest you to do it.

The list of sources Storify let you build your story from is very big:

• Storify itself
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Disqus
• Tumblr
• SoundCloud

are probably the most common sources, but you can also grab content from these other sources: StockTwits, GetGlue, Chute, and BreakingNews

.

Finally, the opportunity to search on Google, embed URLs you may have saved in your favorites or from your RSS reader, makes the potentialities of Storify almost infinite.

Obviously, the stories you create can be exported easily to your Wordpress site (both .com and .org), Tumblr, Posterous. You can also mail your stories directly to the subscribers of your newsletter if you are using MailChimp. In other case, you can embed your story via a line of script. Finally, it is possible to share your story on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ via social buttons.

Be aware that Storify is quite easy to use, to really be able to create a story that engages your readers is not easy at all. This post by Dave Copeland, Do’s and Don’t For Using Storify, describes perfectly how to create a story that won’t let your readers indifferent.

Pearltrees

Pearltrees is probably one of the Curation Content sites on the rise among content marketers.

At first it is not that different from any other social bookmarking site:

• You have a browser app which let you “pearl” the page you are visiting;
• You can connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Pearltrees account;
• You can import the links you may have saved in Delicious.

What makes Pearltrees unique is the visual nature and truly social cooperative nature. It lets you organize your interests into Pearls (let’s say “Topic”) and Pearltrees, which are practically folders where you can add the pages you pearled in a branch. Another interesting function of Pearltrees, as said, is its social cooperative nature, as any other curator expert in your topic may ask to team up with you (and vice versa).

The social nature of the site is not limited to the cooperation between curators though. In fact, as soon as you create your pearls, the system will start presenting you related pearls, which can be added to yours completely or just the branch you are most interested in.

For instance, in a pearl I created about SEO, I added the one about Python, a topic which interests me, but I am not absolutely an expert of; hence it is better for me to rely to the deeper knowledge of another curator.

SEO and SEO Blogs to follow in gfiorelli1 (gfiorelli1)

Finally, as any content curation site, it is possible to share your pearls externally (Twitter, Facebook, email) or embed them in your site. But you can share pearl also internally, for instance to your curation team and those one who picked a pearl from you in the past. An interesting function is the ability to export all the links present in your categorized pearls in a RDF file, which can be easily opened with Excel.

Why do I Need to Curate Content?

There are at least six reasons for considering Content Curation as a tactic to follow in your Web Marketing plan.

Conquering the Long Tail

From a strict SEO point of view, to have a section of your own site dedicated to the curation of the best content related to your market, or to dedicate a section of your blog to it, is a powerful way to enhance the long tail reach of your site.

Obviously, you need to follow the principle of Content Curation as described above (discovers and curates, adds value commenting and providing perspective, crediting the sources) in order to not simply push duplicated content onto your own site.

Tools like Scoop.it, with the opportunity they offer to export your curated content feed into your site make this operation easier.

Finding Sources for Original Content Creation

Another great reason why you should do content curation is that doing it you can collect, find, and re-use (always crediting the original source) great ideas and information, with which you can create great original content.

For instance, using discovery tools like the ones above cited, saving the RSS feed of the best sources about a topic and using tools in order to further select the needed content from those sources (i.e.: Yahoo Pipes and some hacking, as described in this classic post by Dawn Foster).

Sure, for some specific topics it may be very hard to find content online, but don’t forget that a world outside the web exists with tons of sources, which can be easily collected and curated, as I explain in this video I had the pleasure to shoot for Distilled:

Finding Great Contacts for Link Building Outreach

This is almost a natural effect of the Content Curation.

To discover and share only the best content online (and offline) about your niche, puts yourself on the radar of the content creators, fact which can lead you to:

1. Having them linking to your curated content.
2. Establishing a contact with them, and possibly creating a collaboration with them.
3. Creating the opportunity for the creation of original content with them.

To create original content based on the content you have curated can be an excellent method for obtaining links back too from the sources you cite and use.

Then, social curation content is maybe the best way to fulfill the objective of any RSS (Really Simple Stalking) plan, as it was described by Wil Reynolds at the last LinkLove conference.

Obtaining a Great Amount of Social Signals for Your Site (or Social Media Profiles)

Every well executed action of content curation tend to attract readers and to generate a great amount of social signals (tweets, +1s, likes...).

Just take as an example the "anti-Google" posts Aaron Wall writes from time to time on SEObook. They are a classic case of "Elevation Content Curation", as Aaron in those posts usually draft a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings, which he widely credits with links and citations.

Another example is what Expo Comic Mx did so to obtain better results from its Facebook page: to post a tender photoset featuring a happy Stormtrooper family using the photos of Kristina Alexanderson. That photo - a great example of targeted content curation you can see here below - has obtained more than 13K likes, 756 comments, and was shared more than 7,000 times nowadays.

Branding, ORM and Reference Traffic

The explosion of Pinterest, even though now it has evolved into a more complex social marketing tool, is a wonderful example of the benefits of being active and using Content Curation platforms.

Creating a qualified presence for your brand in those kind of sites, practicing a wise Content Curation activity, and being participative with other curators has been demonstrated as a relatively easy way to enhance the thought-out knowledge of a brand. It helps in dominating the SERPs for your brand name (which is great if you have Online Reputation Management issues), and it provides a constant flux of organic traffic to your site; traffic that - as happened with Pinterest - can become really big if those Curation Content sites you are using become widely known to the masses.

Finally, from a strict SEO point of view, the active use of the Curation Content sites helps in making of your site an Entity to Google's eyes, which is now essential in order to gain authority and relevance and not being considered just a minor presence in the web.

Becoming a Reference in Your Industry

Curating the best sources about your industry on your site and, especially, using your social media profiles as a medium to share your discoveries, can really help you in obtaining the objective of becoming - if not the - at least one of reference in your industry.

Again, the reason is quite easy to understand: if you share, comment, and credit only the best sources, then people will tend to look at you as an authoritative source of information, and the creators you cite will start desiring to be cited by you.

And we all know what does it mean to become an authoritative source, also for Google.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

This guest post is by Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com.

Let’s start with a question: What’s the single most important factor when it comes to making money with Google AdSense?

It’s organic traffic (i.e. traffic from Google and other search engines).

Here’s a simple example to illustrate the point. Suppose you have an online forum which receives 500,000 unique visitors per month, but 100% of those are coming directly to the forum, either by a bookmark or by typing the URL on their browsers, because they are already regular members. The second website is a niche site that receives only 250,000 unique visitors per month, but 80% of those are coming from search engines, while the remaining 20% are coming from referring sites. Despite the huge different in traffic levels, if both sites started using Google AdSense the niche, one would earn a lot more (I wouldn’t be surprised if it would be five or even ten times more).

How come?

That’s because visitors coming from search engines are already looking for something in specific (i.e. they are looking whatever they searched on Google) and when they end up on your site they are very likely to click on your AdSense units should they see something that is related to what they’re looking for. Other types tend to click on ads much less often (the ones that visit your site regularly even stop seeing your ads—it’s called ad blindness).

The bottom line is that if you want to increase your AdSense earnings, one of the best things you can do is to increase your organic traffic. That’s easier said than done, I know, but it’s totally possible, and below I want to to share a strategy you can use for this.

The long tail

The central idea of this strategy is to use the long tail to increase your organic traffic.

If you are not familiar with the term, the long tail refers to the tail-shaped curve that is produced when you consider the distribution of certain things. For example, consider the books sold on Amazon.com. There are some books that end up selling millions of copies. Those are the best-sellers, and they are responsible for a big part of Amazon’s revenues. Nothing new here. What about the more obscure books that sell a much fewer number of copies (e.g., from 100 up to 1000). One could think they are negligible to Amazon’s business model, but quite the opposite! The sales volume from each of those books individually might be insignificant, but there are hundreds of thousands of such books, so if you combine their sales the result is quite significant (and some people argued that this is a key advantage for Amazon).

The same principle applies to many things online, including search queries on search engines. A small number of search queries (e.g. “money”, “health”, “business”) take the bulk of the resources on search engines. However, if you sum all the rare and obscure search queries (e.g. “how to make money selling pets”, “health therapy with dolphins”), their volume end up being significant. The image below illustrates this:

How can you use this principle to get more organic traffic? It’s simple: discover the long tail keywords related to your niche and create content to fill the needs of those users. Here’s a step-by-step guide for doing this:

Step 1: Use the double-filter process to find long tail keywords

You can do this step using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. 

Before getting started, on the Filter options make sure to select the locations as “all countries” and the language as “all languages” (after all you are aiming from global traffic). Also, on the left sidebar, change the type of match from “Broad” to “Exact” (this is to ensure the data will be more reliable).

Let’s suppose you have a blog about PC games. You should start with the broadest possible keyword, “PC games”. Now scroll through the results looking for narrower keywords that have at least 50,000 monthly searches. For instance, “pc games download”, “free games for pc” and “pc game list.” Write those on notepad. This is the first filter.

To filter the keywords one more time, pick each of the narrower terms you selected on the previous step and put the on Google’s tool. For instance, I’ll use “pc games download”, as you can see with the screenshot below:

Now you need to scroll through the results one more time, looking for very narrow (i.e. long tail) keywords that have between 1000 and 15000 monthly searches. Some examples I found are: “old pc games download”, “full pc games downloads”, “free pc games downloads for windows 7″, and “games download free full version”.

The longer the keyword the better (as long as it has at least 1000 monthly searches) because ranking for it will be easier.

Step 2: Create a piece of content filling the needs of those users

Google’s main business is search. This means that it needs to deliver results that will completely satisfy its users, else it will start losing money. Knowing this, the starting point for any promotional effort to increase your organic traffic should be the needs of the users you want to attract.

In other words, if you want to receive traffic from the keyword “old pc games download” you must make sure that the page in your site that is supposed to rank well for that keyword has all the information, links and resources someone searching for that term could be looking for.

Now your goal is to create one page/blog post for each of the long tail keywords you found in the first step. You don’t need to do this all in the same day. Instead you could aim to publish a new one every week or so.

Just make sure that the content on that page will be complete and top notch (i.e., don’t be afraid to spend some hours researching and composing it).

Step 3: Promote those pages like you mean it

As you probably know, having great content is only part of the equation if you want to rank well in Google and receive organic traffic. The other part is promotion and backlinks.

Here are some methods you can use to promote each of your pages/posts once you publish them:

• Email the URL of your page to bloggers in your niche saying they might find it interesting. And I don’t mean five or six of them. I mean email it to 100 bloggers and website owners. If you can’t find 100 in websites your niche, you aren’t trying hard enough.
• Guest post on other blogs and, instead of linking to your homepage on the byline, link to the page you are trying to promote. Again, I am not talking about one or two guest posts, but ten or 20 for each page you publish targeting a long tail keyword.
• Leverage social networks like Twitter and Facebook to promote the page, and perhaps create a contest to encourage people to share the page with their friends.
• Post about your page on online forums, Q and A sites, social bookmarking sites, you name it.

Step 4: Wait and profit

That’s pretty much it. After you do all of the above, you’ll just need to wait while your pages go up in the search rankings. Usually this take between four and eight weeks to happen. At this point you should start seeing an increase in the organic traffic, and consequently on your AdSense earnings.

If it works as planned you can go back to Step 1 and repeat the process with other keywords or with other niches as well.

editor’s note: tomorrow, we look at blogging smarter with affiliate sales.

Daniel Scocco is the owner of DailyBlogTips.com, and today he’s launching his AdSense Profits Course. Check it out if you want to discover new strategies and methods you can use to boost your AdSense earnings.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Smarter: A Step-by-step Strategy to Boost Your AdSense Earnings

Integrating social media services in your website design is vital if you want to make it easy for readers to share your content. While some users are happy with the social media buttons that come built into their design template, the majority of WordPress users install a plugin to automatically embed sharing links on their pages. Many of you will find that a plugin does exactly what you need; others not so much. Some are poorly coded, and most include services that you just don’t need. And while some great social media plugins are out there, they don’t integrate with every WordPress design.

If you aren’t comfortable editing your WordPress templates, a plugin is probably the best solution. If you are comfortable making a few edits to your theme, then consider manually integrating social media so that you have more control over what services appear on your website.

Today, we’ll show you how to manually integrate the three most popular social media services on your website: Twitter, Facebook and Google+. First, you’ll learn how to integrate Facebook comments on your WordPress website, to make it easier for readers to discuss your posts. Then, we’ll show you the most common ways to display your latest tweets in the sidebar, which should encourage more people to follow you on Twitter. Finally, we’ll show you how to add sharing buttons for all three social media services to your home page, posts and pages.

Please make sure to back up all of your template files before making any changes, so that you can revert back if something goes wrong. Testing your changes in a non-production area first would also be prudent.

Integrate Facebook Comments On Your Website

Because most people are signed into Facebook when they browse the Web, enabling Facebook comments on your website is a great way to encourage people to leave comments. It also curbs spam. While many solutions purport to reduce spam comments on WordPress, most are either ineffective or frustrate visitors by blocking legitimate comments.

Feature-rich commenting solutions such as IntenseDebate and Disqus have benefits, of course, because they allow users to comment using Facebook and a number of other services; but before visitors can comment, they have to grant access to the application, an additional step that discourages some from commenting. By comparison, integrating Facebook comments directly enables visitors to comment with no fuss. Also, this commenting system allows users to comment by signing into Facebook, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail.

Before integrating Facebook on WordPress Mods at the end of September, I looked at a few solutions. I followed a great tutorial by Joseph Badow and tried a few plugins, such as Facebook Comments For WordPress. The reality, though, is that the official Facebook comment plugin is the quickest and easiest way to add Facebook comments to your website.

Simply follow the steps below to get up and running.

1. Create a Facebook Application

To use Facebook comments on your website, create a new comment application for your website on the Facebook Application page. This step is required, whether you add Facebook comments manually using a third-party plugin or with the official Facebook plugin.

Simply click on the “+ Create New App” button on the Facebook Application page, and enter a unique name for your application in the “App Display Name” field. The “App Namespace” field doesn’t have to be filled in for Facebook comments (it’s used with the Facebook Open Graph Protocol).

You will then be provided with an “App ID/API key” and an “App secret key.” You don’t need to remember these numbers because the official Facebook comments plugin automatically inserts them into the code that you need to add to your website.

2. Add the Code to Your Website

Next, go back to the Facebook Comments plugin page and get the code for your website. The box allows you to change the URL on which comments will be placed, the number of comments to be shown, the width of the box and the color scheme (light or dark).

You don’t have to worry about what you enter in the box because all of the attributes can be modified manually. And it doesn’t matter what URL you enter because we will be replacing it later with the WordPress permalink:

• href
  The URL for this Comments plugin. News feed stories on Facebook will link to this URL.
• width
  The width of the plugin in pixels. The minimum recommended width is 400 pixels.
• colorscheme
  The color scheme for the plugin (either light or dark).
• num_posts
  The number of comments to show by default. The default is 10, and the minimum is 1.
• mobile (beta)
  Whether to show the mobile version. The default is false.

When you click on the “Get Code” button, a box will appear with your plugin code (choose the HTML5 option, because FBML is being deprecated). Make sure to select the application that you set up earlier for your comments so that the correct application ID is added to the code.

Insert the first piece of code directly after the <body> tag in your header.php template:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=YOURAPPLICATIONID";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>

Put the second line of code where you want to show the comments. Make sure the static URL is replaced with the WordPress permalink (<?php the_permalink() ?>) so that comments show correctly on every page of your website.

<div class="fb-comments" data-href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" data-num-posts="15" data-width="500"></div>

To put Facebook comments above WordPress comments, add the above code just below the line that reads <!-- You can start editing here. --> in the comments.php template. To put Facebook comments below WordPress comments, add the above code below the </form> tag (again in the comments.php template).

If you plan to completely replace your WordPress comments with Facebook comments, simply replace the call to your comments.php template with the call to your Facebook comments. For example, to replace comments in posts, simply add the code to the single.php template. Similarly, edit the page.php template to show Facebook comments on pages.

Your should now see the Facebook comments box displayed on your website. To get an update whenever someone leaves a comment using Facebook, add yourself as a moderator to your application on the Comment Moderation tool page.

Show Your Latest Tweets In The Sidebar

Displaying your latest tweets is a good way to encourage people to follow you on Twitter. The most common place to display tweets is in the sidebar, although you can add them to any area of the website.

Display Your Latest Tweets Manually

I have tried a few manual solutions for showing tweets on my websites, and my favorite comes from Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks. His RSS fetching snippet is a quick and effective way to show the latest tweets from your account. The RSS address of your Twitter account is http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx (where xxxxx is your Twitter user name). For the tweets that you favorite, use http://twitter.com/favorites/xxxxx.rss. For example, the RSS for the latest tweets from Smashing Magazine is http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=smashingmag; and to display only the favorites, https://twitter.com/favorites/smashingmag.rss. Once you’ve got your Twitter RSS address, simply add it to Chris’ PHP snippet.

<?php
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed.php');
$rss = fetch_feed('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=smashingmag');
$maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(3);
$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
<?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '<li>No items.</li>';
else
// Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
<li>
<a href='<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>'>
<?php echo $item->get_title(); ?>
</a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

For a more stylish way to display tweets manually, check out Martin Angelov’s tutorial “Display Your Favorite Tweets Using PHP and jQuery,” or Sea of Cloud’s “Javascript Plugin Solution.”

Display Your Latest Tweets Using the Official Twitter Widget

The official Twitter profile widget looks great and is easy to customize. You can define the number of tweets to display and whether the box should expand to show all tweets or provide a scroll bar.

The dimensions can be adjusted manually, or you can use an auto-width option. The color scheme can easily be changed in the settings area, too. Once the widget is the way you want it, simply grab the code and add it to the appropriate WordPress template.

Display Your Latest Tweets Using a WordPress Plugin

If you don’t want to code things manually or use the official Twitter profile widget, you could try one of the many plugins available:

• Cardoza Twitter Box
• Floating Tweets
• Latest Twitter Sidebar Widget
• My Twitter Ticker
• Tweet Blender
• Twitter Plugin for WordPress
• Twitter Widget Pro

Add Social-Media Sharing Buttons To Your WordPress Website

Adding social-media sharing and voting buttons is very straightforward and enables readers to share your content on the Web. Simply get the code directly from the following pages:

• Facebook,
• Google+,
• Twitter.

The buttons you get from the above links work well when added directly to posts (single.php) and pages (page.php). But they don’t work correctly on the home page (index.php) or the archive (archive.php) by default, because we want to show the number of likes, pluses and retweets for each individual article, rather than the page that lists the article. That is, if you simply add the default code to index.php, every button will show the number of shares for your home page, not for each article.

To resolve this, simply make sure that each button uses the article permalink, rather than the URL of the page it is on. To add sharing buttons only to posts, simply choose the button you want from the links above and copy the code to single.php; to add the buttons only to pages, just add the code to page.php.

To show the number of likes, pluses and retweets that an article has on the home page and in the archives, follow the steps noted below for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter below (the code for showing a sharing button on the index page will work for posts and pages, too). You can see an example of sharing buttons integrated in post excerpts on my own website WordPress Mods and on popular blogs such as Mashable.

Facebook

Facebook’s Like button comes with a lot of options. Choose from three layouts: standard, button count and box count. An email button (labelled “Send”) can be added, and you can set the width of the box, too. You can also show profile pictures below the button, choose between the labels “Like” and “Recommend,” choose between a light and dark color scheme, and set the font.

You need to add two pieces of code to your website. First, add the JavaScript SDK code directly after the <body> tag (in the header.php template). This code has to be added only once (i.e. if you’ve already added the code to show Facebook comments on your website, you don’t need to add it again).

Put the second piece of code where you want to show the Like button. To ensure that the correct page is referenced, add href="<?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?>" to the second piece of code. It should look something like this:

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://www.facebook.com/smashmag" href="<?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?>" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true" data-font="arial"></div>

More information on how to customize the Like button can be found on the Facebook Like Button page.

Google+

Google+ offers four sizes of sharing buttons: small, medium, standard and tall. The number of votes that a page has received can be shown inline, shown in a bubble or removed altogether.

Linking to your article’s permalink is very easy. Just append href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" to the g:plusone tag. For example, to show a tall inline Google+ button, you would use the following code:

<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<g:plusone size="tall" annotation="inline" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"></g:plusone>

<!-- Place this render call where appropriate -->
<script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;
po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();
</script>

For more tips on customizing the Google+ button, please view the official Google+ button documentation page.

Twitter

Twitter offers four types of buttons: one for sharing links, one for inviting people to follow you, a hash tag button for tweeting stories, and another for mentions (used for contacting others via Twitter). The button you need to show the number of shares that an article has gotten is called “Share a link.”

On the button customization page, you can choose whether to show the number of retweets and can append “Via,” “Recommend” and “Hashtag” mentions to the shared link.

To make sure Twitter uses the title of your article and the correct URL, simply add ata-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" and data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" to your link. For example, if you were using the small button, you would use:

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-via="smashingmag" ata-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>

To show the larger button instead, simply append data-size="large" to the link. To show the popular vertical button (shown below) instead of the default horizontal button, append data-count="vertical" to the link.

For more tips on customizing the Twitter button, please view the official Twitter button documentation page.

Summary

Many WordPress users continue to use plugins to integrate social-media sharing buttons and activity on their websites. As we’ve seen, though, integrating social-media services manually is straightforward and, for many users, a better solution than simply installing a plugin and making do with whatever features it offers.

Integrating Facebook comments on your website takes only a few minutes and is much less complicated than any of the available plugins. While good tutorials are available that show you how to manually add Twitter to your website, the official widget from Twitter is the best all-around solution for most websites.

Some fantastic plugins exist for WordPress to automatically insert social-media voting buttons in your design. Installing and setting them up takes only a few minutes, although manually adding the buttons enables you to give them maximum visibility.

Remember, play it safe and make any changes in a test area first before applying the changes to the live website. I also recommend backing up all of your template files before changing anything (and your database if required). A few minutes of preparation could save you hours of troubleshooting, so try not to skip this step.

Hopefully, you’ve found this useful. If you are unsure of any aspect of this tutorial, please let us know and we’ll do our best to clarify the step or help you with it. Also, subscribe to Smashing Magazine via RSS, Twitter, Facebook or Google+ to get the latest articles delivered directly to you.

(al)

© Kevin Muldoon for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a Twitter GUI PSD for the recently released Twitter UI update, designed by Jon Darke and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The PSD provides the full mockup with all layers in vectors, allowing you to scale up the design elements without loss of quality. The set includes two versions: one for personal accounts and also the new Twitter Enhanced profile page with 835×90 header image for brands and advertisers.

The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS4+. All assets are redrawn in vector, all layers are labeled and grouped. You can use the freebie for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the file as you wish.

News and activity feeds are more alive today than ever before, even as engagement with their simplest format, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), appears to be waning. What were the Top 10 Most Awesome RSS & Feed Products of 2011? We offer our list below. Though some of these weren't born in the past year, all of them have made a big impact and are thoroughly awesome.

Anyone with an interest in competitive knowledge work should be aware of and give some thought to these applications. We'd love to hear your thoughts on others in comments below, too, readers. I've put the following 10 in a particular order: from the most geeky to the most mainstream.

Sponsor

10. AppNotifications

Fabien Penso's fabulous iPhone push notification app released a 3.0 version this year, but it's just the nice clean basics that make this one a winner. Input any feed, or many other sources of information, and Penso's app will push it to your phone in real time. It works really, really well and is better than ever with the introduction of the Apple Notification Center in iOS5. A double digit percentage of the stories I reported on this year came from feeds I consumed in this app. See also: BoxCar and Notifo.

9. iftt

If This Then That is a point and click mashup maker that lets you do all kinds of things with feeds of information and multiple applications. It's loads of fun, though some high-volume RSS feeds seem to overwhelm it. I wish it worked with AppNotifications above, or UrbanAirship. The ifttt recipe that pushes my Foursquare check-ins into my Google Calendar like a diary entry? That's awesome. Ifttt was recently funded by Betaworks, a story I was able to break because of another awesome feed bot - the Neubot VC portfolio tracker.

8. Flipboard

The feed reader your parents always wished you'd bring home, Flipboard finally released its iPhone version this Fall after more than a year of dominating the iPad magazine reader app market. Competitor Zite is nice and was acquired by CNN, Google's new Currents is ok, Yahoo's competitor is not so great and others are floating around too. Flipboard puts a premium on design though and wins as a result. Adoption of its new iPhone app has been breathtaking. The best way to enjoy Flipboard, though, is to populate it with a great Twitter list.

7. Summify

The computer science nerds behind iPhone app Summify have done a great job combining social engineering, smart algorithms and nice design to solve the information overload problem. If you haven't seen Summify, you should check it out. It feels related to the iPad's News.me, which is a strong contender for this spot in the list as well.

6. Path

The story behind Path seems downright smug - the company's founders reportedly turned down $100 million from Google before even launching and they walk through the wasteland of social networking healing the sick with their mere touch, but the latest version of the app is undeniably fantastic. It's like Facebook Mobile meets Instagram meets Foursquare meets Gowalla meets better design than any of the above. Expect to see a giant pile of apps try to model their design after Path's in the next year. It's a great presentation of an activity feed. It's the kind of thing that nerds and noobs can all love, too.

5. Percolate

"Percolate turns brands into curators," this new startup says. Marketers love this service and it seems to have done a great job of discovering feeds full of content and making them easy for Percolate users to add to and capture value from.

4. Feedly

Feedly rides on top of your Google Reader subscriptions and provides a great cross-platform feed reading experience on web, mobile and tablets. When you're ready to stop messing around with filters, social, recommendations, etc. and you just want to stand in front of a pipe of feeds you subscribed to yourself, Feedly is a great way to do it. (Disclosure: The author did a small amount of consulting for Feedly on launch strategy but has no ongoing financial interest in the company, beyond a glowing endorsement of said consulting services. Sorry, but it's still a feed app that lots of people love.)

3. New Twitter Interactions

Love or hate the #newnewTwitter just launched at the end of this year, the new Interactions tab on web and mobile is a great big nod to activity feeds. It's very cool to see all the relevant activity surfaced with regard to your content: you've been replied to, favorited, added to a list, retweeted. Putting all of that in one big feed is really nice and is probably one of the biggest feed changes that tens of millions of people are going to engage with next year. That will make it one of the biggest, except for...

2. The Facebook Timeline

Facebook's new Timeline feature looks at all the activities you've published into the site since creating your account and it surfaces the highlights by analyzing social activity around each event. It's awesome, if a little frightening. Now that hundreds of millions of people will become familiar with this kind of presentation around their data, they'll be all the more ready for...

1. Facebook Seamless Sharing

The biggest thing in feeds for 2011 is clearly Facebook's Seamless Sharing, or Open Graph Protocol. I think the way the company implemented the paradigm is risky, irresponsible and wrong. But it's going to pave the way for a wholly instrumented world. Today the music you listen to is streamed into your social network and profile (unless you opt-out) and in the future almost everything else you do with a machine will be, too. Every machine you use will be network-connected and will publish data onto the web. Remember when Facebook hired "my year in review" infographic artists Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case this Spring? Their work appeared in the aforementioned Facebook Timeline, but they and their thinking will help build dashboards we use to track our home electricity usage, our debit card activity, our exercise, our travel and a whole lot more in the future. It will all be pushed automatically into the network too, just like Facebook's Seamless Sharing.

Hopefully Facebook can move this ball forward in a way that allows users to make clear, informed decisions how to participate - odds of that aren't great - but either way it's likely to happen. And it's going to be very big.

Those are my list of the Top 10 Feed Technologies in 2011 - what do you think? What should be included? Is there too much Facebook here? Please share your comments below.

Disclosure: The author is building an unlaunched startup related to this sector; it may either compete or collaborate with any number of the above companies. Except Facebook, it doesn't have anything to do with Facebook.

By now you know how great the Feature Box is for growing a profitable blog.

(If not, just read this article about how the Feature Box increased our subscription rate by 51.7%).

The question is how do you create a Feature box?

We’ve whipped together some tutorials for you, but the output was simple. It worked, but some people wanted a fancier Feature Box design.

And now you can have that too!

Introducing A Brand-New, Well-Designed Feature Box for Thesis

We had our awesome designer Alex Mangini whip up a customizable feature box that you can add into your Thesis design, beginning today. Just download the files, and follow the directions.

Here’s an example of what this Feature Box looks like…

And the best part?

This feature box comes with the same great opt-in forms we’ve released over the past few weeks. It’s built-right-in, and it’s modified to work specifically with this feature box.

(See this post here to see what the optin forms look like).

Of course, they’re compatible with AWeber, MailChimp, and Get Response, and installing them into this feature box is literally just copying and pasting some code into the Thesis files.

Additionally, the instructions manual has been documented well, so anyone can install the feature box and optin forms to their site with no problem.

What do you think of this solution?

What do you think? Are you going to use this Feature Box?

Or, if you’ve already been using the feature box, how has it impacted your conversion rates?

Just try using this Feature Box for a few weeks, and let us know how it worked by sharing your results in the comments.

About the Author: Derek Halpern is the marketing guy at DIYthemes, and the founder of Social Triggers. If you liked this article, sign up for his mailing list to learn the "little psychological devices" that persuade people to buy here. You won't regret it.

Security has become a foremost concern on the Web in the past few years. Hackers have always been around, but with the increase in computer literacy and the ease of access to virtually any data, the problem has increased exponentially. It is now rare for a new website to not get comment spam within days of its release, even if it is not promoted at all.

This increase in naughty behavior, however, has spurred developers to write better code, and framework vendors have implemented many functions to help coders in their battle against the dark side.

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

SEOs don't talk about advertising much, perhaps because it's the conceptual opposite of “great content.” The truth is, advertising is the gasoline that runs much of the web. Without ad revenue, great sites we love like Search Engine Land, Smashing Magazine, and even Wired might cease to exist.

Ads are great, but as SEOs we need to present them as the commercials that they are, not the main show.

Optimizing for CTR the Old Way

Not long ago, it was common to see sites like this dominating the SERPs.

(Thanks to Michael Gray for the lead)

When Panda struck, sites like this got hit hard, time and time again. Even websites with superior content were penalized if they contained over-aggressive ads above the fold. I don't know if the site above was penalized by Panda, but I'm guessing their traffic is not as healthy as it could be, and a simple layout change would help significantly.

1. Ads as a Ranking Factor

The 2011 Ranking Factors showed a slight negative correlation between rankings and the amount of Adsense on a page.

Several Panda updates have rolled out since this data was collected, and I would expect the relationship today to be even more negative.

Although Adsense isn't the only game on the market, it's the one ad network SEOs get the most information from. Matt Cutts has said that his team sends one way messages to the Adsense team in order to help webmasters comply with Google quality guidelines.

In April, after Panda hit, Adsense changed how they advocate best practices for ad placement. Gone (or at least tucked away) were the old heat maps.

2. Panda Friendly Layouts

The new layouts specifically advocate for ads that do not push content below the fold.

These are the types of layouts that should be safe no matter what kind of ads you run. You can see earlier versions in their one-click optimizer, but these older layouts don't go very far in placing content first. Use at your own risk.

3. Balance Your Template Footprint

Ads are a component your template footprint. A template footprint is any non-unique content that appears on every page, as opposed to content that makes the page unique.

It's best to keep your ratio of unique content to footprint as high as possible. If you can't reduce your template footprint, at least place your content in the highest, most prominent place possible in order to stay out of the penalty zone.

4. Future Proof Your Ads

The new Adsense recommendations are great for this round of Panda, but what about next year? In my opinion, they represent the minimum of what you should do to avoid a penalty.

The New York Times does a good job of balancing ads against content. Their strategy neither ignores users nor puts them at risk for near-future algorithm changes.

Aggressive ads tend to alienate users, which can affect your bounce rate, time on site, pageviews and other user engagement metrics. All of these can have undesirable long term consequences. For publishers dedicated to long term profits, there is a better approach.

5. Beyond CTR – Smart Ways to Increase Ad Revenue

It's true that higher click-through rates give webmasters incentive to place ads above content. But CTR isn't the only way to increase earnings. You can optimize several other factors to your long term advantage. If you are an Adsense publisher, you are familiar with these concepts.

1. Coverage
2. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
3. Cost Per Impression (CPI or CPM)
4. Impressions

All of these can be optimized for higher earnings. Number 4, impressions, is the most actionable from an SEO point of view. If you're producing great content and promoting it the right way, then your pageviews will soar. Here in the States, the SuperBowl will always make more in ad revenue than reruns of Murder, She Wrote.

If you sell ads, be the SuperBowl of content publishers. Produce the best content you can, and you can sell your premium ad space for top dollar.

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Steve Sande and I have been collaborating on "Talking to Siri," an ebook that just recently hit the Kindle store. It's a how-to that helps you get the most done with your Siri intelligent assistant. We're sharing some of our favorite tips with TUAW readers.

Today, we're looking at Siri's ability to help you pick a place to eat, meet up with friends, and calculate your total at the end. Without further ado, here are eight ways Siri can help you dine.

1. Find restaurants. Tell Siri, "I'm in the mood for Ethiopian food," or ask "What is the best Ethiopian food in Denver?" If you ask more generally, as in the first statement, Siri looks for business near you, sorted by distance: "I found 15 Ethiopian restaurants. 10 of them are fairly close to you." If you search the city as a whole, Siri sorts by Yelp rating: "I've found 15 Ethiopian restaurants. I've sorted them by rating."
2. Get directions. Once you've decided on a restaurant, tell Siri, "How do I get to 'Queen of Sheba.'" Siri replies, "Here are directions to Queen of Sheba," transferring you to the Google Maps application, with suggested routes laid out.
3. Meet up with friends. Ask Siri, "Where is Steve Sande?" Siri uses Find My Friends to see where Steve is -- hopefully on the way to meet up with you and not too far away. Remember, you must log into your Find My Friends account to use this query. Your authenticated session will last for a good long time once you do so.
4. Understand the menu. Curious about something on the menu? Want to learn more before you order? Say, "Search for Ethiopian Injeera on the Web." Siri doesn't handle foreign phrases as well as you might hope, but Google does very good "Did you mean?" analysis, and can help you move from Siri's interpretation to a solid web search about oddball food items.
5. Calculate sales tax. Once you've eaten, say, "How much is $18.95 plus Denver sales tax?" Siri uses the local city rate to add it to your tab.
6. Add a tip. A simple Siri request returns a list of tip amounts including 10%, 15%, 18%, 20% and 25% of a given total. Say, "What is tip on $20.41?" You can also say "What is an 18% tip on $86.74 for four people?" in case you want to split the bill.
7. Find a dessert place nearby. Say, "Where can we go for dessert?" Siri searches through Yelp reviews to find mentions of desserts and lists them (along with their reviews) sorted by proximity. "I've found a number of restaurants whose reviews mention desserts fairly close to you."
8. Get home safely. Once you're done with your evening, tell Siri, "Take me home." Siri provides directions to your home address. If you say, "I'm drunk," Siri will find you taxi cab listings to help you travel in a safe and responsible manner.

Eight cool ways to dine with Siri originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

One of the most bulletproof ways to convert a visitor into a subscriber or buyer is to direct them to a page that convinces them to become one.

What type of page do you need? You need a landing page, a simple page with few distractions and one main goal.

You’ve likely seen these pages in the blogosphere, but for a real-life example, look no further than the WordPress SEO series on DIYthemes.

When you use Thesis, you can create a squeeze page with ease, but there are a few crucial parts missing from that tutorial and today I’m going to expand on them.

But let’s start from scratch, and I’ll show you how to build a complete landing page system in 4 easy steps.

Step 1: Create The Squeeze Page in WordPress

Firstly, all you need to do is create a regular page in WordPress by going to your admin panel → Pages → Add new. Then, set the headline of the page and the permalink structure. You know, the basics of setting up any type of page.

Since you use Thesis, you will see an additional box towards the bottom of the screen editor called SEO Details and Additional Style.

Expand that box and look for the input box towards the bottom that says CSS Class.

For the class name, enter the word landing. For each landing page you create, make sure you do this step and set the body class to landing.

That’s all you’ll need to do for this step. Go ahead and publish the page!

Step 2: Setting Up a Bare-Bones Landing Page in Thesis

For starters, you need to set up the basic template of the landing page (or, strip away all of the distractions from the default theme).

You need to remove the header, sidebar and footer. These elements, by default, have no business being on your landing page and will only distract visitors from the main content.

Now I know that sounds complicated, but by using some of the amazing filters packed into Thesis, it’s a cinch. All you have to do is paste this function into your custom_functions.php file:

function custom_remove_defaults($content) { return false; }

function landing_page() { if (is_page('78')) {
		add_filter('thesis_show_header', 'custom_remove_defaults');
		add_filter('thesis_show_sidebars', 'custom_remove_defaults');
		add_filter('thesis_show_footer', 'custom_remove_defaults');
} }
	add_action('template_redirect','landing_page');

To target a certain landing page, you will need to change the page ID to the ID of the page you just created. As this tutorial explains, you can find the page ID by:

…One method of page identification is to hover over the “edit” link in the WordPress > Pages section.

In most browsers, the status bar in the lower left will show a URL containing the id: http://YOURSITE.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=78&action=edit.

TIP: If you want to create multiple landing pages, you can use an array to target multiple pages. Just replace the first line in the landing_page function with this:

function landing_page() { if(is_page(array('78','79','80'))) {

…and change the page IDs accordingly.

Step 3: Adding a Logo + Simple Footer

The code above works great for stripping your theme, but it makes it seem a little too empty. Your site will be left without any branding, and it may confuse visitors and make them think that they left your site.

So, we are going to bring a piece of your header back: the logo. We do not want a navigation menu or any other elements from your header back — apart from the logo. This is done to keep readers on the page, and not have them go elsewhere on your site.

Paste this function under the one we created in the last step:

If you use the Full-Width Framework, use the following code:

function landing_header() { if(is_page('78')) { ?>
	<div id="header_area" class="full_width">
		<div class="page">
			<div id="header">
				<img src="LOGO IMAGE URL" alt="DESCRIPTIVE TEXT" title="DESCRIPTIVE TEXT" />
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
<?php } }
	add_action('thesis_hook_before_html', 'landing_header');

If you use the Page Framework, use the following code:

function landing_header() { if(is_page('78')) { ?>
	<div id="header">
		<img src="LOGO IMAGE URL" alt="DESCRIPTIVE TEXT" title="DESCRIPTIVE TEXT" />
	</div>
<?php } }
	add_action('thesis_hook_before_html', 'landing_header');

All you need to do is change the page ID (use the same ID as the last step) and paste the URL to your logo in the tag.

Next is to create a simple footer. All you place in the footer is copyright information, and other legal documents. Again, keeping things simple.

If you use the Full-Width Framework, use the following code:

function landing_footer() { if(is_page('78')) { ?>
	<div id="footer_area" class="full_width">
		<div class="page">
			<div id="footer">
				<p>Copyright © 2011 My Awesome Site</p>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
<?php } }
	add_action('thesis_hook_after_html', 'landing_footer');

If you use the Page Framework, use the following code:

function landing_footer() { if(is_page('78')) { ?>
	<div id="footer">
		<p>Copyright © 2011 My Awesome Site</p>
	</div>
<?php } }
	add_action('thesis_hook_after_html', 'landing_footer');

Save and upload custom_functions.php.

4. Adding Some Quick CSS

Luckily, there is only a need for a tiny bit of CSS to put this page all together.

Paste the following into custom.css:

.landing #header { background-image: none; }

.landing .page { width: 65em; }

.landing #header, .landing .headline_area, .landing #footer { text-align: center; }

All this code does is resizes the content area so the page is smaller (for readability purposes) and aligns the text in the header, headline area and footer to the center.

It will also remove the background image from the header, so there is not a double logo.

Once you have gone through those 4 quick steps, you should have a more complete landing page system for your site.

Do you already have a nice landing page on your site? Or, have you just created something great by following this tutorial?

In the comments below, feel free to show off a landing page from your blog and tell us at least one thing you are trying to accomplish with it.

About the Author: Alex Mangini is an 18 year old Thesis expert from New Jersey who creates premium Thesis skins at Kolakube.com.