Dayn W Creative

These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:

• Open Site Explorer: Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool – Powered by SEOmoz’s data, this alternative to Google “site:” search or Yahoo Site Explorer let’s you discover the sites linking to you or your competition, and rates them by authority.
• Wanna Know How Your Neighbors Spend Their Money? It’s All on Bundle.com | Fast Company – Say hi to social financial influence brought to you by Razorfish & access to US spending data.
• Best Tweets from SEMPDX Searchfest 2010 Conference | Burlington Bytes – @PeteJewett’s fantastic tweet roll of the best-of tweets from #SearchFest 2010.
• Google Launches the Google Apps Marketplace -
• Blog Smarter | Zemanta Ltd. – Enhance blog posts automatically with related content and images. Gives you tips and advice as you write. Firefox extension. Promote your posts more efffectively. Must try this.

First things first. If you’re still using MySpace, please find another profile based network. There are so many other good ones like Facebook, or Virb.

I’ve been doing some data piping for clients lately, especially of the “syndicate my blog updates to my social networks” flavor. Today, I discovered that if a shortened URL like those generated by bit.ly, tr.im, or is.gd) is fed into a MySpace status update, not only will MySpace re-shorten it with lnk.ms/***, but they will also redirect that link to an internal MySpace page, accusing that you’ve been reported as a spammer, phisher, or naughty hacker.

If you’ll be automatically piping status update data to MySpace, make sure you aren’t shortening links. Some social syndication services don’t have to use a link shortener, try PingVine, or disable the one in Ping.fm. At this time, Twitterfeed shortens all URLs no matter what.

For WordPress users, try cross-posting with the MySpace Crossposter plugin. This posts your blog entries also on your MySpace “blog”, instead of your status.

OR… just stop using MySpace.

Personally, I find it’s really not too complicated of a process.  When writing an email or blog post, I try to think of a subject line or heading that would instantly make me click a story, or open an email.  I can look through emails and stories that I have clicked, and re-engineer a headline based on the same principals.  For me, those principals are usually relevance to projects I’m working on, and time investment to process the article or email.  Off the top of my head, I’d be hooked by “Top 5 WordPress plugins for designers” or “How to build an events engine in PHP”, or “Quick, professional masking techniques for After Effects”,  etc.

For more info on the science of subject lines and headlines, check out these articles:

15 Tips for Improved Subject Lines

The Subject Line Dead Zone

Email Marketing Subject Line Comparison (ironically a non-compelling headine IMHO)

It’s the day we unofficially celebrate the existence of the WordPress blogging platform.  Big thanks to Automattic for forging what has become one of our weapons of choice.

We hearted WordPress right out of the gate for its easy configuration as a simple content management system.  As open and streamlined as many CMSs are aimed at being, many “simple” CMSs with good intentions tend to be too bloated for some of our clients.  When we started using WP, it was the perfect minimalist shim to wedge in that static XHTML/CSS to simple custom CMS site gap. (more…)