Adding Site Feeds to Google Buzz

One of the more popular features of Twitter is the ability through their API to post at intervals or when an RSS feed is updated a tweet to Twitter automatically. So blog owners don’t have to worry about tweeting their new blog entries cause it is done automatically from a service like TwitterFeed.com.

With Google Buzz being the latest micro blogging platform, everyone wants the same features as Twitter from Google. Of course Google doesn’t want some of the features that it deems to be problematic, but it does allow you to post your RSS feed automatically to your Buzz account whenever a new post is available. Just how do you get Buzz to connect to your site or sites?

There are a number of posts about adding a an XFN tag to the site or a rel=me tag when you link back to your site from Google. But all this seemed silly to me because the sites aren’t profiles of me, they are just blogs that I work on occasionally about topics that I enjoy. Then I discovered the simple way to connect a site.

Go to the Webmaster Tools portal within your Google account and add the site you want to connect to within Buzz. Verify the site by adding a file or a meta tag to the header of the home page. Then return to GMail, Click on Buzz, and Click on connected sites. The new sites will now be available for connection. Your latest post will appear within Buzz and new posts will automatically be posted.

Now if only I could figure out how to get more followers of my Google Buzz without a public interface.

Blog Carnivals for Good Backlinks

If you haven’t been a part of or hosted a blog carnival but are looking for good back links, you should consider becoming a member of BlogCarnival.com and participating. Blog Carnival runs daily carnivals of articles from around the Internet on various topics. You can submit your own articles to the carnivals and gain important back links to your site. Each carnival operator has the discretion to only include the articles they see fit, so your article must be good and your description must be relevant to get mentioned.

I run two blog carnivals currently on a bi-weekly basis and receive between 15-20 articles each edition. I generally post all articles as the sites do not carry much page rank weight. But sites with high page ranks are that much more sought after and tend to be more selective for their carnivals.

Today the categories included family, wedding flowers, fashion, homeschooling, taxes, and evolution. The taxes blog carnival was posted on a blog with a page rank of five which gives you a direct PG5 link while the post remains on the front page. I like to sort the carnivals by categories and then by the date of the next carnival posting. This way my articles are submitted to relevant carnivals that will be appearing soon.

Best of luck with your link building and begin running a blog carnival to give back to the community.

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LinkMarket – The Link Exchnage Network

I was receiving many varied request to exchange links with webmasters on a number of different sites. I began to search for a network where I could do all my link exchanges without having to email individual site owners. LinkMarket.com came up in the search results from Google and I have been working with them since that time.

Using the ASP.Net Ajax Accordion

It was suggested that we utilize the Ajax Accordion control in a recent project and although the software is easy to install finding decent documentation on a quick solution was not as simple. I did finally stumble upon a couple of examples and modified the code from them to come up with an easy way to implement an image based menu with the accordion style navigation.

The first thing to do is register the Ajax Control Kit in the page header.

<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajaxToolkit"%>

Place the Script Manage on the page itself or on the Master Page.Placing the Script Manager on the Master Page worked well in our case as multiple pages used Ajax .

    "ScriptManager1" runat="server">
            

The main body of code contains the Accordion definition, a Panes area, an Accordion Pane definition, a Header, a Content area, and closing tags. The unique thing that we did was to place an asp image object within the header group instead of text. Our content area also contained a user control but the links of the menu could have been created directly on the page just as well.

    "Accordion1" runat="server" FadeTransitions="True" 
    SelectedIndex="0" TransitionDuration="100"  HeaderCssClass="accordionHeader" 
    ContentCssClass="accordionContent" AutoSize="None" ToolTip="Something">
     
    "AccordionPane5" runat="server">
    
"server" AlternateText="Some Text" ImageUrl="~/Images/Menu1.png" />    
    
    
    ...
    ... Links to Menu items.
    ...