John Costa - Blog

Entries in Twitter (2)

Friday

29May2009

How To Add a Twitter "Button" To Your Blog.

Friday, May 29, 2009 at 8:46AM

See that button over there that looks like this: Are you wondering to yourself "How'd he get that there? In this tutorial, I'll show you haw to do that.

I get most of my Buttons from Twitter Buttons. Right now I'm going to break down every part of thier code and show you how to modify it how you'd like.

First, let's take a look at the code:

<a href="http://twitter.com/YourLink"><img src="http://www.twitterbuttons.com/images/ex/twitter-31a.png" title="By: TwitterButtons.com" width="212" height="69" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.speed-your-pc.com">Speed up your PC</a>

Does that look confusing? Well, it's really not.

First look at <a href="http://twitter.com/YourLink"> this is just the URL the button will link to, so obviously you'd change the YourLink to your Twitter username, or you can change the entire URL.

Now look at <img src="http://www.twitterbuttons.com/images/ex/twitter-31a.png" This is the link to the image where the button is coming from. If you wanted to make a YouTube button for example, all you would have to do is post the DIRECT link to the image. When I say DIRECT, this means that the window that the image is in MUST be blank except for the image you want to use. For example, this would not work, while this would.

Now let's peek at title="By: TwitterButtons.com" width="212" height="69" /> All this is, is the tag that appears when the mouse hovers over the image.

This width="212" height="69" /> is the size of the image, which should be modified accordingly.

Lastly is just a link that appears at the bottom of the imgage, which I deleate.

I have made a list of good Twitter Buttons here that you can use if you don't like the ones from Twitter Buttons.

Thanks for reading! Hope you learned something.

John Costa |

Tweetie for Mac

Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 4:21PM

Tweetie for Mac is one of the first native and clean Twitter clients for Mac OS X. Atebits has spent several months creating a very much anticipated (for me anyway) desktop client that brings beauty, functionality and simplicity into one package.

Features:

Tweetie does what all Twitter clients should, pull your Twitter updates, and does it well, but it does lack some key features that I would have liked to see. Tweetie has the ability to favorite tweets,but there is no way to un-favorite them or see tweets that were marked favorites on other clients such as the web, TweetDeck, Twhirl, or other popular applications. Another feature it is lacking is the ability to create groups. Groups allow you to only see specific peoples tweets. I wish I could have the ability to turn on auto-follow to increase my number of followers, but not have to see their tweets. Atebits has teamed up with yFrog, a popular image hosting service for Twitter, and now allows you to record videos and put them on yFrogs servers for everyone to see. Also, Tweetie has support for audible notices and text notices when you receive new Tweets.

Pros:

Tweetie has a small black box up in Mac OS X's status menu (near the clock and wi-fi indicator) that illuminates blue when new tweets, mentions (@replys), or Direct Messages are received. Also Tweetie includes a search Easy tool, a URL shortener, and a way to post images with a verity of setting to change and customize your favorite URL shortening service or picture hoster any way you'd like. Easy Another thing that I like, which others may not, is that the "What are you doing" box is located in a separate window, allowing you to have as many thoughts forming to tweets as you'd like. Another upside to this is that you can compose your tweet without seeing the bulky window that is reserved for your friend's tweets.

Easy

Cons:

Tweeite is really nice but as I said before, it lacks features such as un-favoriting tweets and creating groups. Also a downside is that it costs $19 dollars. But cheer up, because there is a free version that you may use as long as you want, but it is ad-supported. While the ads are not annoying and disappear as time goes by, they are still there and take up room on the Timeline.

Final Rating:

I give Tweetie for Mac a solid 4 stars out of 5 rating because of its elegance and its ability to do the basics well. It also has some features that are important that I didn't talk about such as re-tweeting and small things like that.

Find Tweetie for Mac here

Find a sort demo here

John Costa |