Blair Williams

Everything is an Experiment

Software

Announcing the Pretty Link API

Announcing the Pretty Link API

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The Pretty Link Plugin for WordPress now has an API (as of version 1.3.28) that Developers can connect with to shorten links using a user's WordPress website.

Are you a WordPress plugin developer? Or are you developing a killer app for Twitter, Facebook or other Social media? It is now possible to give your users the ability to create short links with their own domain name (in addition to offering them with the options of Bit.ly, TinyURL, etc).

There are 2 ways that the Pretty Link API can be accessed:

  1. As a Local WordPress API — there are a set of Pretty Link functions that have been defined and are usable by mock api, WordPress plugin developers.
  2. As a Remote XML-RPC API — there are a set of XML-RPC based functions that can be used by any other application that is Internet enabled. It doesn't matter what language your App is written in, if it is Internet-based or a client app running on the desktop — you can now offer your users the ability to create short links on their own domains.

For more details about the Pretty Link API, please visit the Pretty Link API page here:

https://blairwilliams.com/pretty-link/api/

How to Get Started Using Pretty Link

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UPDATE: This video is out of date — please watch my new Pretty Link Intro Video
I've had a ton of requests to put some tutorials up on the site — here's the first one. I'm planning on releasing 1 of these every week for a while. This one will show you how to install Pretty Link, create your first links and post them to Twitter.

Next week I'll go a little more in depth about the awesome options you can set for your links in Pretty Link. Seriously, Pretty Link has many options that will help you build your SEO efforts, mask your links and create buzz for your brand.

Feel free to leave a comment about this video, if you have any questions about pretty link in general or if there's a Tutorial you'd like to see. Later.

Introducing PrettyBar

Introducing PrettyBar

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pretty_bar_exampleOkay, I know … Digg recently had a full revolt on their hands when they released the DiggBar … but trust me, there are plenty of uses for a Digg-Like bar on redirect links for those of us running WordPress based websites. Before you start make sure that you learn ‘how to create a website‘.?In the most recent release of PrettyLink I created a new feature that I think is AWESOME — the “PrettyBar” … This is an optional bar that you can place at the top of the page you redirect your users to. This bar can have your look & feel, links to your site and encourages users to tweet/retweet your link to others! Here are just a few of the uses I came up with for the PrettyBar (off the top of my head):

  1. Viral Twitter Campaigns — Use Pretty Links in your Twitter posts instead of bit.ly or tinyurl.com and use the Pretty Bar. Not only will you be able to accurately track these links in Pretty Link but you'll have a built in way for your link to be re-tweeted.
  2. Website Promotion — If you send out a lot of links, just think of the impact of giving the end viewer of the link a way to get back to your website! You're effectively posting ads out on the internet that have a built in way for users to get back to your site. Even if only a small percentage click the link to your blog, it is better than nothing :).
  3. SEO Link Building — Imagine the possibilities of every URL you post to Twitter, Facebook, or wherever having an automatic link back to you! I mean you can link to news stories, youtube videos, whatever — and get some links back to you.
  4. Sandbox User Comments — okay I haven't gotten this feature fully completed yet 🙂 … but soon, you'll be able to replace all links in your user comments with Pretty Links with (or without) the PrettyBar. This will keep users tethered to your site for a while in a non-threatening way.

Here are some links I've already created with it:

https://blairwilliams.com/x0z

https://blairwilliams.com/j8u

I'm really excited about this feature for my own marketing efforts… Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of this feature!

5 Reasons Why WordPress Websites Are Better

5 Reasons Why WordPress Websites Are Better

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wordpress_logoWordPress based websites are faster to setup, easier to maintain, easier to market and extend.

I've been developing websites for years and have used about every technology available for creating them. First of all, let me make a distinction — by “website” I mean any content driven website or blog — as opposed to a custom web application (I love using Ruby on Rails for functional webapps). I've used Perl/CGI, Java, Straight PHP, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Ruby on Rails and python to develop content driven websites for myself and my clients … these all inevitably result in disaster because I (the programmer) have to continue to maintain and update these sites over time. Also, the client usually has feature requests that I then have to build for them — these features cost them money and suck away my time. Landing page builder wordpress is your way to success.

About 2 years ago I started messing around with WordPress and have been deploying WordPress based sites ever since — because they are simply better, here's why:

  1. WordPress is SolidWordPress is the basis for thousands of high-traffic websites and is now a refined, well-tuned app for creating websites. It's more solid than anything that a developer could create on a first try (yes, even me) because its been in the “wild” for years and has gone through many iterations.
  2. WordPress is SimpleSeriously, who likes working through FTP, SSH or a programmer to update files on their website? No one. WordPress has done a better job of making it easy for non-technical people to update and contribute to a website than any other technology I've seen. It's even made Theme & Plugin development really nice which is why there is a large and expanding number of them out on the web.
  3. WordPress has an Unbeatable Feature SetSome of my favorite built in feature like LifterLMS Review + Ultimate Guide – But is Worth It? (2021) are WordPress's rich text editor (that I'm using to write this blog post), media uploader (which allows you to upload multiple files at once), dynamic RSS feeds, category management, tagging and comment management. This is a well thought out, cohesive environment for managing a website.But what if you want your website to do that WordPress doesn't currently do with its built in features? I'd wager there's a plugin built for it. You can replace the graphics on your website in no time with WordPress's outstanding theme management or extend its feature set with a WordPress Plugin. There are plugins to help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), release a Podcast, store all of your media files on Amazon S3, customize your login screen and even create shortlinks on your site (I wrote that one). Currently there are over 4,000 plugins and 700 themes that are listed at wordpress.org! But plugins do not suffice in achieving a healthy SEO, for you'd also need to select the right keywords and also include curated links in your websites. If you want your site to look good and do a lot in a short amount of time, you can't do any better than WordPress.
  4. WordPress is Easier to MaintainWhat if you have a custom website built by a programmer … who then decides not to work for you anymore? You are screwed — the ramp up time for another developer to come in and reverse engineer his code could be enough to send you reeling. But if you base your site on WordPress, you can easily find another developer to work on it … most freelance developers and graphic designers out there simply can't afford not to know their way around WordPress anymore.In addition to this benefit, WordPress has a built-in updating mechanism that pretty much puts updates on autopilot. Open-source developers around the world continually release updates to WordPress and its plugins for free — this is huge! If you hire someone to build your site, you have to pay them every time you need an update and you're pretty much guaranteed that you won't be commissioning developers to update your site with security patches. Let the WordPress developers do the heavy lifting–take advantage of their free work. The Scepter Marketing website helps you streamline your business processes and generate more revenue.
  5. WordPress is Open-Source!Not only is WordPress the absolute best system to base your website on but it's 100% open source and doesn't cost anything (free as in free speech and free as in free beer). This is great for me since I feel like there are very few software providers that actually give me the flexibility to do what I need to do who don't charge me an arm and a leg.

Does WordPress have any problems or limitations? Absolutely — it is an evolving application — but it is much better and cheaper than trying to get someone to build a content-based website from scratch for you.

New Pretty Link Features Added

New Pretty Link Features Added

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Well, since the launch of my first public WordPress Plugin, Pretty Link a couple of weeks ago I've had an overwhelming and positive response. I've added several new features that the community has requested in my latest release. I really think that these changes are making Pretty Link the ultimate link shrinking / redirection / tracking method available (I'm using it in my own marketing efforts and love it). Here's a breakdown of what's new in the last few releases (up to the 1.2.5 release) of Pretty Link:

  • User Interface Enhancements — I just added some nice javascript enhancements to make things easier. I had a few people tell me that they couldn't see the calendar dropdown on the stats page (sometimes flash likes to stay above javascript pop overs) — this has now been fixed. I'll probably be making more of these types of enhancements in coming weeks.

    picture-39
    A shot of some of the new enhancements
  • Simple Link Sharing — Post your links to Twitter or share them via Email … these can be done from the new quick actions link list under each slug name on the main Pretty Link page:

    picture-41
    A shot of the new actions bar for each slug
  • Awesome Click Tracking — You can now see information about each individual click on your site including: Operating System, Browser, Browser Version, Referring URL, IP Address, and even the remote host name.

    picture-40
    A shot of the new click tracking details

What do you think?

I seriously want to make this plugin great and I have several ideas for features that I'd like to add soon. Here are some of the possible features I could add to Pretty Link in the near future:

  • Goal Tracking — say you have users going to a sign up page for your eNewsletter and you want to be able to see how effective it is. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do that easily in Pretty Link?
  • Pretty Links Widget — I'm thinking that you could put a sidebar widget on your blog that would show all, a selected group or a randomized group of your pretty links. This could be great for Affiliate marketers who promote several different products.
  • Download Click / Goal Data — I'm pretty sure this one will happen soon, I want to be able to download click data and stats to Excel so that I can analyze it more carefully.
  • Link Names and Notes — In an effort to keep the interface simple I haven't added a field for a name and description on the edit / new page of Pretty Link. I'm thinking that this may be important for the Widget feature and to generally keep track of links as users have increasing numbers of pretty links (especially if they're using the randomly generated slugs).
  • Link Filtering & Searching — This would allow users who have large lists of Pretty Links to manage them a little easier — they'd be able to search or filter them.
  • Optional iFrame Redirection — Okay, now I know that Digg and several other sites that redirect but keep users in their own iframe have been taking a lot of heat lately — but this may make sense for some of us — on some links. I'm thinking this would be a simple bar at the top of the site the user is redirected to that would have your Blog name & subhead and a way to close it. Of course, this would be an advanced option on each Pretty Link and not turned on by default.
  • Enhanced Reporting — Of course if goal tracking is added, there would have to be goal tracking (with calculated conversion rates) added to the stats page but I'm thinking about adding some other charts including a pie chart of Operating Systems and Browsers. If you have any other stats you'd like to see added to this plugin, please let me know.
  • Pretty Link Groups — I'm not sure how helpful this would be — or if it would just be confusing but for some users it may be very helpful to be able to group pretty links.
  • Click Geo Location — I'd love to do this one right now, unfortunately I haven't found a really good way to do it technically in a 100% open source application. If anyone out there knows of a good solution, let me know.

I'd like to thank all of you who have gone out and given me a good rating on Pretty Link's WordPress Plugin Page and have helped to promote this plugin — that kind of response is really fun to see. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions or ideas on how I can make this plugin better … THANKS!

Turn your iPod into a Skype Phone

Turn your iPod into a Skype Phone

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iPod Touch 2GRecently, Skype launched an app for the iPhone for its free Voice over IP service. I downloaded it and installed it on my iPhone the other day and liked it quite a bit. My brother lives in a different city — since we're both on the computer 24×7 and we work together we use Skype everyday. My brother has an iPod Touch and so of course he installed Skype and we tried it out — he could hear me but we couldn't hold a conversation because his iPod Touch has no mic. Well, I did a little research and as it turns out, the same microphone accessories that work with the iPhone also work with the iPod Touch. Here are a couple of places you can go to learn about them:

This is a MacWorld article from a year ago that reviews different third party microphone adapters:
https://blairwilliams.com/y1x

This is a link to the Griffen Mic Adapter which was the #1 mic adapter MacWorld reviewed — I'm probably going to get this one, it's only $19.99:
https://blairwilliams.com/8v2

The Apple iPhone headphones will also work with the iPod Touch 2G — This one should definitely work but costs $29.99:
https://blairwilliams.com/kzm

With this small cost (assuming you already have an iPod Touch), you can have yourself a skype phone that you can use anywhere you can get wireless Internet. Well, even though I don't have an iPod Touch, I'm planning on taking advantage of Skype to help me keep my minutes down. I've got my Google Voice account and I'll be using it to route calls to skype first and then my phone — since I'm around a Wi-Fi connection 90% of the time, this should help me at least conserve minutes. For your business you can use the voip phone systems melbourne.

Don’t Use TinyURL – Create and Track Links from your WordPress Website

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A few weeks ago I started getting frustrated because I had to go into my apache config file every time I wanted to add a redirect link. I stopped using BudURL and TinyURL some time ago because my users have started to realize that they're being tracked whenever they see a link from one of these services. I've talked with several other Affiliate marketers and they've been saying the same thing, “don't put a tinyurl on your site.” Affiliates are always concerned with masking their URLs and with tracking so these link shrinking services seemed perfect for them… well, now users have caught on.

Last week, I started working on my own replacement for TinyURL, a WordPress plugin named “Pretty Link.” The thing that's great about this plugin is that I can now generate ultra small urls that redirect wherever I want and hang off of my domain name! I'm also able to track clicks on these URLs and in future releases of this plugin more stats than just clicks in future upgrades.

I just released this plugin tonight and can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory here:

https://blairwilliams.com/download