add_feed() adds a custom feed to your WordPress site. I discovered this function recently when I needed to create a feed that uses a custom query. Specifically, a client needed a feed that pulled together content in a single category from multiple custom post types. The default WordPress category feeds will not pull content from multiple custom post types.

The code below can be dropped into functions.php in your theme folder or it could be rolled into a plugin.

add_feed( 'games' , 'make_games_feed' );

function make_games_feed(){
 $args = array(
 'post_type' => array('post','project'),
 'cat' => get_cat_id('games')
 );

query_posts($args);
 include_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/feed-rss2.php');
 wp_reset_query();
}

After this code is added to your site, you must flush the rewrite rules to get it to take effect. A quick way to do this is to go to SETTINGS -> PERMALINKS and click SAVE CHANGES. You don’t have to actually make a change.

The post add_feed(); appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

I was not surprised by the announcement that Posterous will turn off on April 30. Even before they were bought by Twitter a year ago, I was warning people of the danger involved in renting a web presence. If you don’t own it, you don’t really control it.

“@digitaltrends: Twitter will shut down Posterous at the end of April bit.ly/XMvIQz”. < @jeffturner You warned me re this 2 yrs ago

— That Peter Brewer (@thatpeterbrewer) February 16, 2013

But the announcement did help to reinforce the concept in my own mind. Recently I’ve been flirting with the idea of recommending to a friend that they use Tumblr instead of WordPress for a personal wine blog. It seems like a perfect option for them. It’s easy to set up, easy to maintain, comes with a built in community, and the Tubmlr app makes it brain dead simple to add content. Except for the content part, it sounds like a description for a great apartment complex.

Owning is often too hard.

We should be able to have the best of both worlds. I’ve been banging on this drum for several years to no avail. The promise of WordPress 3.1 was supposed to be “easy.” And it didn’t deliver. Here we are two years later and  the WordPress dashboard can still be a daunting place for a beginner. It’s frustrating for experienced users too. And it’s even more frustrating to see sites like Tumblr release tools that make publishing to WordPress look like rocket surgery. I find myself longing for the ease that these sites deliver.

For example, when I’m posting a photo to my photo blog, In The Viewfinder, using the WordPress app, it forces me to deal with the raw html code in the edit window and forces me to go to preview mode to see what it would look like if I add text. Compare that with the overall experience of the Tumblr app and you can see why people would want to use it instead. The app gets the code out of the way and makes it easy for the average person to attach a photo and know that it’s done. And Posterous was just as simple.

I think it’s long past time for the WordPress community to step up and build a better user experience for self-hosted blogs. This means removing the clutter from the online dashboard and improving the mobile app experience. There’s no reason the average user should have to deal with the distractions WordPress offers today. If we could make owning easier, renting wouldn’t seem like such an attractive option.

The post Nobody Should Feel The Need To Rent Their Web Presence appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

A screenshot of the hijacked page is at the bottom of this post. Leading up to the hijack, Frank tweeted about what he was doing.

I bet these bastards still think I won’t fight back and let them get away with betraying me and escaping payment.But first, coffee.

— Frank Jonen (@frankjonen) February 14, 2013

They thought paying invoices was ‘optional’. They ignored all reminders. Let’s see if they’ll ignore this: fitnesssf.com

— Frank Jonen (@frankjonen) February 14, 2013

Bad form, dude.

Frank, I get it. You’re pissed. You feel wronged. You want revenge. This is not the way to go about it. Here’s why:

• If you had any chance of reconciling a business relationship with this client, you can kiss it goodbye. You put a nail in the coffin. You will never have a relationship with this client and you will never get paid. Instead, you may be facing a possible lawsuit.
• The page you posted is getting traffic on Twitter and you are getting noticed. But this is not the kind of press you want. Any potential clients that see this page will never hire you. You will forever be labeled as unstable.
• It looks like you were attempting to make Fitness SF look bad and that you want their clients to take action. Make no mistake, you are the only one who looks bad here. And you look really, really bad.

Managing Expectations

I do not know the details of the relationship between Frank and his client and I have no idea what led up to the relationship going sour. Frank may have delivered late. He may have delivered work that was not what Fitness SF was expecting. Fitness SF may not have paid their bill for a number of reasons, many of which are not malicious. Who knows…

Regardless, Frank’s expectations about how he was to get paid were not met. And it was Frank’s responsibility to communicate those expectations before things got out of hand. I wonder if the milestones were set up in a way where the majority of payment was paid after the project was delivered. If they were, Fitness SF would have been motivated to make sure their entire project was absolutely final before paying for their project.

We prefer to establish milestones for our projects that include interval payments. This ensures that we ask for approvals throughout the project. Aside from payments, we make every effort to stay in constant communication with our clients. We request client feedback throughout our production process, at some points on a daily basis. If there is something wrong, we know very quickly and we can address it right away. Small problems should never have a chance to escalate to the level of complete dissatisfaction. But even with the best of intentions, it can happen.

Lots of things can change while working on a web project. I have never been on a project where the scope hasn’t changed over the course of the project. How you deal with scope change is what separates a good developer from a great developer.

This is a sad day for web developers everywhere.

The reason I’m disappointed is because Frank’s actions make all developers look bad. It tarnishes our industry and creates a trust barrier between clients and developers. I have spoken to many potential clients in my career who have a horror story about a former developer. I’m sure Fitness SF has their own story to tell.

Not getting paid is usually a matter of expectations being out of whack. We’ve had clients that weren’t able to pay their bills. It happens. And while I don’t like it, we have always found a way to deal with it peacefully.

Don’t be like Frank.

For more, see this AdWeek post.

The post When Developers Go Rogue appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

The entire basis of Tareq Ismail’s argument was the difficulty of typing in long sentences on a mobile phone. “It’s simple: Graph Search for mobile would need to incorporate speech, which is a different beast altogether,” Tareq wrote. “Many of the examples given during the Graph Search keynote contained long sentences, which are not easy to type on a mobile device. Think of the example “My college friends who like roller blading that live in Palo Alto.” Search engines like Google get around this on mobile by offering autofill suggestions, but their suggestions come from billions of queries. For Facebook, since their search is based on hundreds of individual values like “fencing” or “college friends” specific to each user and not a group, autofill suggestions will often not be useful, or worse, will require a lot of tapping and swiping to drill down to the full request.”

I’m in a noisy Starbucks as I type this. I just pulled up the notes app on my iPhone and spoke the words from above, “My college friends who like roller blading that live in Palo Alto.” Guess what? That’s exactly what Siri returned in the text. Perfectly.

On modern smart phones, this is a non-issue. The ability to “incorporate speech” into an app is simply built in to the latest iPhones and iPads using the up-to-date iOS software. The images to the right show how it’s implemented, automatically, into the myFirstAm app we built for First American Title. There was no special coding required to make this possible.

Speech to text is also an integrated part of the Android operating system. In fact, it’s been possible for several years. The author also argues, “speech recognition doesn’t come cheap.” I just don’t get it. How much cheaper could free be? Ongoing improvements and investment in speech-to-text technology will be coming from the mobile OS side, not the app side.

I will agree with two of Tareq’s arguments, however. First he says, “Names are Facebook’s strength and speech recognition’s weakness.” No doubt… but I think this is a minor hurdle for Facebook to overcome in getting mobile adoption for their Facebook graph search, not a roadblock.

Second, he rightly states, “Facebook has over a billion users who collectively speak hundreds of different languages. Facebook has said they’re beginning their launch with English. How long until all billion users’ languages are supported for the desktop?” As an English speaking American with no discernable accent, speech to text is significantly better for me than most people. I realize this. And yet, I still don’t see this as a barrier to Facebook launching graph search on mobile. As iPhone and Android grow their ability to recognize and translte speech into text, in any language, all apps that take advantage of it will grow as well.

If Facebook’s graph search has value, people will find a way to use it on mobile. Its adoption, as well as other natural language search, won’t be slowed by speech-to-text. If it’s useful, it will get used, even if I have to type a long sentence.

The post Mobile Speech To Text Is A Hurdle, Not A Barrier appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Joanna Clay recently interviewed me for an article she wrote in the OC Register: Aliso Viejo website arouses security, cost questions. She asked my opinions on alisoviejoexchange.com, a site built by a local developer. They were paid $37,500 to build the site and that it took 5 months to develop.

D’oh!

It’s not really my desire to judge other developers, but my initial reaction was that this does not feel like a site that would cost $38k to develop. This is a very simple directory site that looks like it was built with an existing template. Even if it was built from scratch, the whole site is comprised of three page templates: The home page, the detail page and the static content page. Oh and let’s not forget the sweet YouTube video splash screen!

Judging turnaround time is complex, however. It’s impossible to look at a site and understand what may have happened behind the scenes to cause delays. As any developer knows, a simple project can go sideways quick when communication breaks down with a client or when scope shifts. In a perfect world, sure, 5 months is way too long. But the development world is never perfect.

As I told Joanna during the interview, it is difficult to say exactly what went wrong with this project as I was not privy to the internal development process. My comments were based on my own experience and I made several assumptions.

So I asked the people…The people of WordPress

I run a private Facebook group for the OC WordPress Meetup and I posted a link to the article for discussion. My friend Jeff Hester asked “Based on the article, what do you think the lesson is for developers?” Great question. Here are a few of my thoughts…

1. Be transparent

My assumption is that there wasn’t a lot of transparency on this project. Projects can get bloated when the developer is “hiding” something from the client. It appears to me that We The Creative does not have a lot of web development experience in their portfolio and they may not have been forthcoming with this.

I am a firm believer in full transparency with my clients. I let them know very clearly what we can and cannot do. We are transparent with our core strengths and we let them know if a task is not in our wheelhouse. We let our clients know what technologies we are utilizing and why. We build on WordPress and we use existing plugins and themes. Leveraging existing technology provides a quicker time to market and that is a value to our clients.

2. Use common tools

A search on builtwith.com will expose that the developer used Ruby on Rails to build this site. An earlier search showed that they used a CMS called SDL Tridion, although that isn’t showing up any longer (I’m not sure why). When a developer builds with not-so common technologies, it locks the client in with that developer. There aren’t as many developers experienced with these platforms. If things go south with that developer, the next one will will most likely recommend a compete rebuild.

We only build sites using common tools. And our clients own the code. If something were to go wrong, our clients all have the peace of mind of knowing that their development can be taken over by another resource. And most importantly, other resources are available.

3. Be responsible

I am betting that the original timeline on this project was not 5 months. It had to have been far shorter. Who would sign off on 5 months for such a simple website?!? Something caused a delay in the schedule. I assume the deadlines got pushed on either the client side or the developer side or both.

The responsibility of controlling deadlines lies with the developer. It is the job of the developer to set the expectations early in the project, specifically what happens when the schedule slips. When there are no expectations, minor slippage can turn into major slippage quickly.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

The post Overspending in Aliso Viejo appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

That sentence should probably have an exclamation point at the end of it. The matter of fact tone doesn’t seem to do its arrival justice, given the wow factor the device brings with it.  The Leap Motion web site probably states it best, “For four years we’ve been obsessed with one question: how can we interact with computers in a better, more natural way? We finally found the answer: the Leap Motion controller. Our breakthrough technology uses a mathematical approach to bring you 3D, touch-free motion control that’s unlike anything else. Ever.”

I’m in agreement with those that feel gesture control is the future of computer interface. We’ve already seen what can happen to the user experience on touch devices and I’d personally be lost without even the touchpad gesture controls of the Macbook Pro on which I’m typing this blog post.

We’re not sure what we’re going to do with our test unit here at Zeek Interactive yet, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to at least be at the forefront of experiencing this new “leap” forward in computer interaction. My first experience with it had just the cool factor I thought it would, even if only to to watch my fingers move in the air to move my curser around the visualizer that is part of the dev kit download.

If you’ve never seen what the Leap Motion Controller can do, this video should get you as excited as it got me.

The post A Leap Into The Future Of Computer Interface appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Too often we have prospective clients who approach us with the desire to simply mimic their website experience in an attempt to have “something” in the iTunes store. Unless a website naturally lends itself to a mobile environment, which few do, this doesn’t excite us very much. If you’re simply attempting to mirror your web experience in an iPhone app, my advice is almost always going to be, “don’t build an app.”

Alan Arora, VP of Customer Facing Technology at First American Title, and his team came to us with a different mission. “We want to make the myFirstAm iPhone app incredibly cool,” Alan said, “but to us that doesn’t mean just a pretty iPhone version of our web app. We want the customer experience in the app to be in tune with the way Realtors® actually work on the go, as if it were one step ahead in anticipating their needs. If we could do that we think our customers would agree that is cool!” This was music to our ears.

A User-Focused App Experience Goal

Our goal was to make some assumptions about how the app would be used on the road, and present a “typical user” experience that would create a high value right at launch. What we found, in looking at competitive apps, is that other title company apps were doing exactly what we advise against. They presented an essentially non-mobile experience to the app upon launch, pushing the user to menu-based options right out of the gate. As you can see from the screen grabs below, each app presented basically the same experience. And that experience did not take advantage of the unique capabilities of a truly mobile app or make any assumptions about what a mobiel user would be doing in their app.

Thankfully, we happen to have a former real estate agent managing our production here at Zeek, Kelley Koehler. So, we turned to Kelley to provide us with insight on how, as a real estate agent, she would want to use an app that gave her access to property records and related documents. “If I’m going to use this app on my phone, I’m most likely out with clients, trying to find answers about the home we’re standing in at the time.  Or wanting information about the neighbor’s home.  Or quick comps for that area,” Kelley said. “If I’m using this on a mobile device, I want fast information about the homes around me, without having to tell the app where I am.”

So, we painted the picture of a specific user type for this app experience. As a result, the myFirstAm iPhone app uses a very different approach than the competitor apps. It takes advantage of the phone’s ability to know exactly where you are, and makes an educated assumption, backed up by web data, about how a real estate agent would want to use the app on their phone. In doing so, it purposefully strays from the standard menu-based approach that other mobile title apps take.

The myFirstAm iPhone app completely deviates from the myFirstAm web experience and returns, upon launch, a completed search for property data based on where you are when you launch the app. It also drops the results on a hybrid satellite view of the location to make it easy to verify that the results returned are indeed the right results. “This house has a pool in the backyard,” for example.

In one click, you have the property records. If you want to do a more advanced search, you can do that right from the launch screen and in one click can also expose a menu for options to view things like title and escrow orders or ordering customer service. The “typical user” assumption does not impede easy access to the other options for accessing information. That’s important.

We believe mobile users require their own user experience. We believe myFirstAm delivers on that belief. Too often companies mimic their online experience simply to keep the “brand experience” consistent. In many cases, this is simply a mistake. It’s based on a misconception of what “brand” really means and often sacrifices the user at the altar of corporate consistency.

The myFirstAm iPhone/iPad app is making its public debut at Inman Connect‘s “Show Me Your App” party on Wednesday, August 1, 2012. It will be free to download and requires a myFirstAm.com account to use. A myFirstAm.com account is also free. A First American Title representative can assist you in setting up your account.

We’re thankful for the opportunity to work with a company that understood, from the beginning, that the mobile user deserved a unique mobile experience. And we’re thankful for the freedom to build it.

The post Mobile Users Deserve A Mobile Experience appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

This position is located in Huntington Beach, CA.

This individual will be responsible for testing a wide variety of both web applications and iOS applications, handling multiple projects of different scale at the same time.  Projects involve both ongoing regression testing of websites in maintenance mode, as well as the creation and execution of test cases against new projects in development.

The ideal candidate will have a background in computer science or in software testing, meticulous attention to detail, strong analytical skills, and strong written and verbal communication skills.  A degree in CS or web development experience is desired, but is not required.

Candidates with prior QA experience will be preferred.

Responsibilities:

• Analyze requirements and designs
• Create test plans and use cases
• Execute test plans
• Identify issues and generate bug reports
• Work closely with development staff to resolve issues
• Identify potential UI/UX errors or improvements
• Identify functional opportunities for improvement within the software to create a better user experience
• Contribute to future planning and development

Qualifications:

• Strong understanding of web applications is required
• Experience in test/QA
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and mobile applications is preferred
• Background in Computer Science, web development, or related field is a plus
• Very detailed and task oriented
• Strong written and verbal skills
• Able to work independently, managing your own time, and focused on completing tasks
• Experience with customer service is a plus
• Must work out of the Huntington Beach office

NO AGENCIES.

Please submit resumes to jobs at zeek dot com. 

___

photo credit: via Flickr by Thoth, God of Knowledge

The post Wanted: Software Tester In Huntington Beach, California appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Responsive Design Themes are beginning to show up in larger numbers. 

Ahmed Esam – @drtemon
Good Minimal A Responsive WordPress Theme. #wordpress http://t.co/tj017Vr9

As responsive design continues to move into the mainstream, we’re going to be seeing a lot of themes pop up with responsive design characteristics built in. The Good Minimal theme’s menu breaks down at one point in the page width adjustments, but it’s a good example of what’s to come in this area. What are your favorite themes that have responsive design built in?

Dre Armeda on WordPress Security

bkmacdaddy designs – @bkmacdaddy
#WordPress End-User Security by Dre Armeda – http://t.co/iOvaLm0g

Dre Armeda is our favorite WordPress security expert. If you’ve never seen one of his security presentations, here’s a chance to see him in action online. Even if you have seen his presentation before, chances are you’re not doing everything he suggests, so watch it again.

WordPress 3.3 is on its way

beAutomated – @beAutomated
As of today, we are a steamroller paving the way to WordPress 3.3 launch http://t.co/m9qixnCw #web #cms #WordPress

Yes, WordPress 3.3 is on the way. For those of us lucky enough to have been given indepth tours and insight into coming features, the update is eagerly awaited. This is a great post by Jane Wells, and she rightly comments, “For the people working on the release, most of whom run trunk on their own sites for at least a month or two (if not longer) before each launch, it’s easy to forget that features we had done months ago — flyout menus, drag and drop uploading — are still being hoarded by us (and more recently by the lucky recipients of a merge onto wordpress.com) and are not available on the sites of regular users.” This kind of sentiment is what makes the WordPress community and platform so great. We at Zeek are proud to be a part of it.

And some thoughts from Mashable on important 3.3 features:

dean guadagni – @deansguide
Do you use #wordpress for your business? http://t.co/1mrtmIUZ v. 3.3′s 11 most important features

Resist the urge to take shortcuts

Todd Carpenter – @tcar
How ghetto is it to use an HTML table to format a WordPress Page? #idontwanttowriteacutompagetemplate cc @housechick @zengy @ReggieRPR

The answer, and I know that Mr. Carpenter knows this, is yes, and it’s also just a bad practice. “The problem with using HTML tables,” according to Steve Zehngut, “is that page sizes are much larger, the tables often take longer to load and by using tables, you’re not really future proofing your site. In addition divs are simply more SEO friendly.”

And A New Feature in Jetpack 1.2 – Email Subscriptions

beAutomated – @beAutomated
How to use Email Subscriptions in Jetpack 1.2 http://t.co/qqMB8es3 #WordPress #Automattic #Jetpact #Email #Subscriptions

According to Automattic, “All features in Jetpack 1.2 are on by default. So subscriptions, like all other features in Jetpack, requires no magic to activate. Visitors to your blog can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they have already commented on.”

Where will the email subscription links appears on your blog? ”Two places. One is on by default, the other you have to activate manually. By default, you will see two new checkboxes on every blog post, at the bottom of the comments form. To add the Subscriptions Widget to your sidebar, go to your Dashboard. Then click on Widgets. You will see a widget called ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’. Click on it, and drag it to the sidebar on the right.”

The post Responsive Design, WordPress Security and Ghetto Coding appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

This conversation will cover the following:

• Setting client expectations throughout the software development process.
• Asking questions that help eliminate unnecessary work.
• Executing a Statement of Work (SOW): why it is mandatory and what goes in.
• Eliminating small problems before they become big problems.
• Putting yourself in your client’s shoes when building a website.
• Getting clients and (more importantly) keeping clients.

What qualifies me to speak on this topic? Over Zeek’s 16 years in business, we have enjoyed long-term relationships with several great clients. And we do this by being honest and open with our strengths as well as our limitations. There are no secrets that we keep from our clients and we make it clear what they are getting into at the start of the working relationship. We have realized over time that this is a key differentiator between Zeek and other developers. Both developers and clients will benefit from the session.

I need votes! Please click the “thumbs up” button now on this page: http://bit.ly/oIDGeU

The post Please Vote for My Session appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Gahlord Dewald clued me in on this one. He knows how much I desire to listen and we have shared a common listening strategy for years. We try to listen to help. Gahlord likes to look for “the special hashtag people use when looking to be helped.” It’s called a question mark. And it’s a powerful hashtag indeed.

The folks at inboxQ understand this: “We started InboxQ because we realized that there were lots of questions being asked by people on Twitter but most weren’t receiving very useful answers. In fact, most questions go completely unanswered on Twitter.” And that’s a fact.

What inboxQ does is find that special hashtag for you. Pop in a few keywords and inboxQ begins scouring twitter, looking for people you can assist. Your first step is to create what they call “campaigns.”

A campaign is simply a category of keywords or hashtags used to delineate possible questions to be answered. You can create as many campaigns as you wish. The campaign opened for view above is called “wordpress.” And I’ve been using the inboxQ Chrome extension to answer questions using the Zeek Interactive account on Twitter for a few days now.

It  has been uncovering 20-30 questions each day.

You can answer the questions right in the extension’s window, without having to fire up Twitter or any of their third party apps, as you can see above. Of course, you can also see that I could be a bit more diligent about opening up the extension. Questions, after all, are best answered when someone is around to listen. Though, my results have been pretty good so far, even without constant attention.

Blog Post Fodder

Another thing the questions are good for is blog post ideas. I’m using the “TODO” tab to save questions I feel require more than 140 characters. Like these:

After a few days, the results have been very positive. I’ve been able to answer a few questions and create some good dialogue around WordPress, conversations we want to take part in. I’m not answering the question with any other desire than to help. But sometimes the questions open up an opportunity to talk about what we do as well. Witness this exchange:

I didn’t know James Hicks before I saw his question. And I know I would never have seen his question before inboxQ. I have no idea where it will lead, but I already consider the minute (total) I spent on it valuable. I hope James does as well.

What’s missing from inboxQ?

It does what it says it does really well, so there are only two things I’d really like to see added. First, the ability to add multiple accounts. I’d like to use the tool for other Twitter accounts I monitor, but it only allows for one account to be connected at a time right now. I can’t imagine this isn’t part of their future development strategy. Second, I’d like them to charge for it. I’m tired of seeing services like this drop off the map because they don’t have a way of making money. I’d pay for this one.

What kind of “listening to help” campaigns would you create?

The post Listening To Help – inboxQ appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

And make no mistake about it, we’re cats. Self-herding is not in our nature. We need help. Luckily, we’ve found it. We are happy to announce a new member is joining our team – Kelley Koehler, aka @housechick.

While Kelley is best known for her work as a REALTOR® in Tucson, Arizona, and as a nationally recognized real estate blogger, she has always thought of herself as “just a geek in realtor clothing.” And for good reason.

She graduated Cum Laude from the University of Arizona, Tucson with a degree in Systems and Sofware Engineering and immediately moved into the tech space as a Systems Engineer at Siemens/Gardner Transportation Systems. In her duties at Gardner Systems, Kelley was responsible for the creation, implementation, and maintenance of quality control and testing for the company’s various software systems. She was also Co-Owner of Applied Real Estate Technology, where she helped develop and market a cutting-edge IDX solution with an indexable WordPress aspect. She is a member of the advisory board for the Social Media Marketing Institute and is a highly regarded speaker on topics related to optimizing lead-generating websites and social media profiles to drive sales.

We are honored to have her join our team. At Zeek, she will combine her sales and marketing background with her passion for all things geek to help us better serve our clients and insure that every product we create is delivered with the highest level of testing and quality control.

She will be moving from Tucson to Southern California to join us full time in early April. We can’t wait!

___________________________________________
edit: from Kelley: “Making The Next Leap”
edit2: from Jay: “Bidding A Fond Farewell“

The post Zeekchick? We Like The Sound Of It. appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Lesson for today? Don’t judge too soon.

The post Testing SocialEyes With David Geller – We Didn’t Do Very Well appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

That was one of the reasons Tumblr founder David Karp gave to TechCrunch this week when asked why he created the Tumblr blogging platform. “All blogs took the same form,” he notes. “I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose.” And the beauty of micro-blogging platforms like Tumblre and Posterous is how easy they are to use. Tumblr’s bookmarklet is beautiful and the foundation of Posterous is email, but both have moved on to created incredibly simple to use iPhone apps the compliment their original ease of use propositions.

Another beauty of Tumblr, specifically, is the way it handles different post formats. Highlight a selection of copy in an article and click on the Tumblre bookmarklet and it knows you want to make a quote. It presents you with a dialogue that makes sense for that format and then posts using a style that enhances that format.

I’ve been using Tumblr to drive Just Dug Up (see the image to the right) for many years now. I use it because it’s simple. I use it because it makes the tidbits I find during my web wanderings look better than they actually are. I don’t have to think hard, I don’t have to format anything, I just click. Easy. Fast. Painless.

Similarly, I’ve used Posterous for JeffTurner.mobi since Posterous was launched. I use it when I’m on the go or when I want to do a quick review of a mobile app that requires multiple screen shots. Again, Posterous makes is simple. Email the group of screenshots or use their iPhone app and it takes care of creating an image viewer, like the one below, without any intervention on my part.

Why can’t WordPress be that simple?

I’ve wondered out loud about this in the past. Why can’t the existing WordPress ”press this” bookmarklet be turned into something more intelligent, like Tumblr’s bookmarklet? Why can’t it sense that when I’m highlighting text, I probably want to format it like a quote? Why can’t I post multiple photos and have WordPress understand that I want them shown in a slideshow format? And herein lies the promise of WordPress 3.1, at least in part.

When Matt Mullenweg announced the live version of WordPress 3.1, he said, “There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts…”

And there are some really promising Themes ready to carry out that task, including Wumblr, Lightbright, and from WooThemes,  Auld, each of which do a great job of taking advantage of this new post format feature. Auld distinguishes itself already by taking advantage of a slew of “Tumblog” utilities that WooThemes has provided for some time now, including Express App for iPhone, extensive multimedia support, and their advanced QuickPress funtionality that is built into the theme.

The good folks at WooThemes have made their Tumblog Plugin available to everyone. And their documentation on what to do to make your blog tumblog read is extensive. So, you can tune any theme to take advantage of the power of the new WordPress 3.1 features. The Tumblog plugin automatically enables their QuickPress widget. Combine that with their Express App and you’ve just taken a huge leap toward the ease of use that distinguishes platforms like Tumblr and Posterous.

Here’s the problem. Something is missing.

All of that is excellent, but  the main reason why I’ve been excited for the release of WordPress 3.1 is the hope that it wouldn’t require me to run to so many different sources for plugins and widgets to get to this kind of functionality. The problem? Something is still missing. It’s a better bookmarklet.

I don’t do most of my content creation on the go. I pick through my feed reader in the mornings looking for good content to talk about and love the ease of getting that content to Tumblr. The Tumblr bookmarklet is what makes it so simple. And while there are rumors that a new Press This! bookmarklet may be in the works for the next release of WordPress, I’m sad it didn’t make it into this release.

I’d rather be posting slightly longer reactions to content right here on Zeek.com, but I don’t want to have to continually jump back and forth between the wordpress dashboard, my feed reader and the post I’m reading. I want to highlight a quote, add my comments and hit send without having to think about formatting. That’s what Tumblr provides right now.

We’re so close.

The promise of WordPress 3.1 is ease of use. We just need a better bookmarklet.

The post The Promise Of WordPress 3.1 – Easy appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

My close friends and neighbors are moving back to Dallas, Texas. The moving van outside my front door is a sad reminder of that fact. When talking to them, my wife learned that they have used the same moving company for each of their last seven moves. That’s a pretty impressive number. It’s also represents a high return on North American‘s initial marketing investment.

Companies spend a lot of time and money trying to find new customers. We focus a great deal of attention on the process of bringing them in the door. We make lots of promises about the kind of work we’ll do for them. The same attention needs to be applied to keeping them. It seems to me the formula for this is pretty simple.

1. Deliver on your promise.
2. Stay in touch.

We forget how simple it is sometimes. I need to stop forgetting.

The post The Best New Business Is Repeat Business appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Yesterday I updated with great anticipation, hoping that the quality of the new video chat capabilities on the Skype app would live up to the quality of video I’ve experienced with Apple’s Facetime. To my delight, on a WiFi connection, Skype rocked.

Video chat over 3G is the difference.

What I was even happier to find, however, is that on a decent 3g connection, the experience was just as good. I video Skyped with Steve Zehngut in the parking lot of LA Fitness and with Dan Green right before I got on the treadmill. No question… Skype for iPhone trumps FaceTime video chat with ease. If you’re a Skype user, this is a no brainer.

Obviously, bandwidth will be an issue with any video service. So, I wanted to see how Skype behaved with a single bar. So, I dialed up Jay Thompson while at a stop light. The result? I got a pretty decent video, but the audio was horrid. Then the light changed.

What’s more dangerous than texting while driving? Skype video chatting while driving.

You have been warned.

The post What Is More Dangerous Than Texting While Driving? appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

About 2/3 of the way into the podcast, one of David’s Colleagues at Edelman, Robin Hamman, mentioned how social technology was leading companies to “involve internal stakeholders more widely.” His focus quickly shifted to examples that seemed more external stakeholder focused, but this is an area of social technology that fascinates me. How can we better use social tools to change the conversations inside of organizations, not simply as new marketing vehicles.

I’ve long promoted the fact that my all-time favorite business book is Leadership And The New Science, by Margaret J. Wheatley. She wrote the foreward to another book I just recently began reading titled, Authentic Conversations: Moving From Manipulaton To Truth And Commitment, by Jamie and Maren Showkeir. They begin with a premise that I agree with, “I believe we can change the world if we just start talking to one another again.”

It is an extremely simple premise, but one I find incredibly powerful. “Conversations are more significant than we are aware of, more powerful than we acknowledge. They are much like breathing.” And this is one of the great promises of social tools… that they will provide the mechanism for better conversations inside organizations.

We Have To Change Our Conversations.

We have to move away from the notion we’ve all grown up with, that conversations in organizations are tools for getting what we want, “for winning others over to our points of view.” We have to move away from conversations that are rooted in the thinking of the industrial age and move to new conversations that obliterate command and control boundaries. These conversations will necessarily involve internal stakeholders more widely and will “create, reveal, sustain or change organizational culture.”

These are exciting times we live in.

The post Moving From Manipulation To Truth appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

Oh me, oh my! What’ll I do?
I can’t find an elephant to tie my shoe.
But I know what, and so do you,
I don’t need an elephant to tie my shoe.
No, you don’t need an elephant to tie your shoe.

I’ve tried to stay away from writing about QR codes. I’ve done thismainly because I just don’t care about them, but somewhat out of fear that I’ll simply add to the already ridiculous level of hype. There is a special level of hype around QR codes in the real estate industry. Realtors® wishing to be perceived as “tech savvy” are plastering them on everything they can, but rarely doing anything more than linking back to a website that would be just as easily, and more broadly, reached via a shortened URL.

There are certainly going to be some unique uses for QR codes, but using them as a replacement for a URL is not one of them.  It’s like looking for an elephant to tie your shoes. Or a lumberjack to pour your milk.

Oh me, oh my! What’ll I do?
I can’t find a lumberjack to pour my milk.
But I know what, and so do you,
I don’t need a lumberjack to pour my milk.
No, I don’t need a lumberjack to pour my milk.

The post QR Codes: You Don’t Need An Elephant To Tie Your Shoes appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

I commented on the drive for CNN on Showbiz Tonight (above) and said I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that they wouldn’t raise the money. But I was also asked a question that didn’t end up in the commentary. The question was whose followers do you think will have the greatest impact on the campaign. The answer to that question requires a bit more analysis.

Big Number Don’t Necessarily Translate To Big Engagement

My response was that big numbers don’t necessarily translate into big engagement. I cited the difference between Justin Timberlake and User as an example. Justin Timberlake has roughly 3.5 Million followers on Twitter, compared to Usher’s almost 1 Million. But when you look at their Klout numbers, Usher’s engagement with his smaller audience creates between 5 to 7 times the number of retweets and mentions as Timberlake’s engagement. The differences between their Facebook fan pages is fairly stark as well. When you read the status updates from each. Usher tends to be more conversational in the updates to his 10 million Facebook fans, while Timberlake’s 5 million fans get what feels more like a series of press releases.

The success of this charity endeavor would seem to fall on whether their fans were truly engaged and whether NOT being able to use their social media channels would hinder their ability to raise the funds.

In truth, the accounts are not really dead. They’re mostly dead. The various Twitter accounts have continued to put out sporadic messages, like this tweet from Alicia Keys, “@aliciakeys – is dead but Elizabeth & her sone are alive thannks to KCS http://bit.ly/1Z5t7P Text ALICIA to 90999 & reply YES to give $10.”

At the time of this writing, two days into the campaign, they have raised $183,603. More than half of that was raised on the first day. At this current pace, the $1 Million goal won’t be hit until after Christmas. Will they really refrain from using those channels for anything but the sporadic updates to reach the goal until then?

Annette Gallagher, a Facebook friend, had this to say about their absence this morning: “I think the pics and such may have creeped out some potential donors, as well as the “stunt” aura around the whole thing. It is a fantastic charity though, and hey, I won’t complain if it takes Ms. Kardashian a little time to get back on the internets. ”

It’s the last part of that comment that I’ve heard several times, “I wouldn’t mind if (fill in the blank) stopped tweeting. Others have chimed in with their thoughts as well, and they all lean toward, “I don’t really care if they stop.” This falls in line with a post this morning about four social media myths that fooled marketers… one of them being that “Twitter’s success hinges on celebrities.” I never personally bought into that one, and the truth of that becomes clearer every day. Personally, I hope they get to the $1 Million goal quickly. It’s a great cause.

What’s your take? How do you think this campaign will fair and how influential do you believe celebrities are in the social media space?

The post What If The Stars “Die” And Nobody Cares? appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

So, if you’re currently monitoring multiple Twitter accounts using Twext.me, you will be able to continue to do so. Those of you who were monitoring a single Twitter account, we will be deleting your account. You will be able to get instant mention notification using Twitter’s new notification features. These can be found under the mobile setting in your Twitter account.

And, you never know, we may add a feature or two for those power users.

The post Twextme Will Shut Down For Users With One Twitter Account appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

According to the Fourtrace website, “Fourtrace is a research project in “Advanced topics in Computer Networking” at University of California, Santa Barbara. Our goal is to find out if it’s possible to predict where a user is at a given time.”

The site uses only the public Foursquare check-ins found on Twitter, so it is limited to only what Foursquare users choose to share. However, even those who limit their public sharing have the potential to display predictable patterns of behavior. Over a long enough period of time, even small amounts of sharing begin to add up. How could it the information be used? Time will tell.

The post Fourtrace Urges You To Think Before Sharing appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

“We want to make sure you see important Tweets even when you’re not looking at Twitter at the moment. To help with that, today we’re launching push notifications for @mentions.”

TWEXT.ME?

Since this is essentially why we created Twext.me for Ben Martin, we will be evaluating what to do with Twext.me in the next 24 hours. For those of you with one Twitter account, we’d advise switching away from Twext.me immediately. The mentions notifications are sent almost instantaneously.

To set up your Twitter account to notify you via SMS when you get mentioned, go to your settings on Twitter, select Mobile and tell it how you want it to act. The illustration to the right shows you the setting for having all mentions from anyone sent to your phone.

Note: Twitter will only allow one account to be associated with a phone number. So if you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can only have mentions sent to a single phone number from one of those accounts.

The post Twitter Adds SMS Support For Mentions appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

My iPhone has become my main camera.

It’s not because the quality of the camera is so amazing, thought it’s certainly not bad. It’s because of the applications available to edit photos and create effects on the fly. I’m particularly fond of the analog camera simulation apps like Hipstamatic, PictureShow, Lo-Mob, Plastic Bullet and Infinicam. But I love AutoStitch, You Gotta See This! and Pro HDR as well. Each one, individually, has it’s place in my photo arsenal. And I post photos to my main photo blog, In The Viewfinder, almost exclusively using edited iPhone photos.

But one of my favorite things to do is use the apps in combination. And I may be doing it in ways the creators never envisioned, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite ways to combine apps. The photo to the right is a photo of a sunflower straight from the iPhone without having been processed through any app.

Infinicam + Pro HDR

For this example, I used two photos manipulated using Infinicam. I then combined those images in two different orders in Pro HDR. I have used this technique with exports from Plastic Bullet and PictureShow as the starting point as well.  Here’s a finished example from two different Plastic Bullet exports combined using Pro HDR – Rush Hour.

Pro HDR is my favorite HDR app for the iPhone, and I use it a great deal in the way it was intended to be used. However, using the “Library HDR” option from the main menu of the app, you can force it to process any two photos of the same size. Your results will change based on which photo you choose as the “darker” image and which photo you choose as the “lighter” image. Example:

The results can change dramatically when you simply choose the alternate photo to begin the process.

There is no way to predict what the end result will be, but that’s the beauty of this process. I love the surprise of a beautifully random and unexpected combination. You may prefer the first result above. I preferred the second and published that photo to my photo blog. All of the original files can be seen at full size in this Flickr photo set -  Using Pro HDR To Create Interesting Effects.

Give this simple technique a shot on some of your photos and be sure to come back and put a link to your results in the comments. I’d love to see them.

The post Getting Creative With Pro HDR On The iPhone appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

We are currently working on the new website for Flashback Heart Attack, a fantastic local 80s cover band. As a part of the site, I wanted to build an 80s music playlist and embed it as a sidebar widget into their new site.

I’ve used Blip.fm in the past as a “Be Your Own DJ” type of service. Lately, however, Blip.fm just isn’t cutting it. Most of the songs I search for either aren’t available or I get some obscure version of the song. When I do find songs that I want to blip, they’re usually the YouTube video and the sound quality is typically terrible.

I asked my Facebook friends for a recommendation and they turned me on to GrooveShark. I’m totally blown away by this site! It is everything Blip.fm should have been and more. I highly recommend that you give it a spin.

Most of the songs I searched for were available and they were all high quality versions. For the few I didn’t find, I uploaded my own mp3 files to the library quickly. I created a playlist called “80s” and then added each of the songs I wanted into that list. Once I had the list the way I liked it, I clicked on the share link (under “options”) and created this widget.

The interface is simple and the whole site is very easy to use. I am not sure if any of this is legal or not, but it sure is fun! Enjoy!

The post Blown Away By Grooveshark appeared first on Zeek Interactive.

The universally accepted “send an update to Twitter using the headline via the one allowed account tied to my blog when I hit publish” option just ain’t cutting it for me anymore.

Can we be smarter about this? A headline is not always the best status update message. I may want to hit publish and send a message out to Twitter or Facebook at a later time or to each one at different times. I may want to make sure a second or third update gets sent out later in the day or the following week. I might want those to highlight the post from a different angle.

And I’d like to do all of those things at the same time that I’m writing the post, so I don’t have to think about it or remember to do it later. Let me choose from several different Twitter accounts. Let me publish to those different Twitter accounts at different times, with different messages, suited for their specific audiences. Is this too much to ask?

One more thing… add this same functionality to the Press This bookmarklet. This would make me happy. For now.

If you know of a plug-in that will make this happen right now, let me know.

The post Why Should This Headline Be My Status Update? appeared first on Zeek Interactive.