Plugin Monday: Please Update Total Social Followers!

photo credit: billaday When I was building this site with Jerry Brito about a year ago, we were hoping to drop the total ReadyMadeWeb follower count from all platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner, and Mailchimp—into the little blurb you see at the top of the right sidebar. This can be done through a bit of PHP and ...

AddThis Buttons Cost 15 Points in YSlow Score

photo credit: kyz Last night, after working for several hours to boost the load-time of pages on the popular economics blog MarginalRevolution, I was at a loss for what else I could do to boost the site’s performance as indicated by Google’s PageSpeed and Yahoo’s YSlow evaluation tools.  I had only managed to boost its ...

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media

How Facebook Treats Your Data

If you’ve been confused about the ever-changing privacy policy (or lack-of-privacy policy) on Facebook, Matt McKeon has a great graphic that explains the changes from 2005 to 2010. The graphic clearly shows how Facebook users have slowly had all of their information made increasingly public.  The 2010 graphic shows all user data made completely available ...

PR Pollution: Three Reasons to Stop Spamming & Start Building Real Relationships

Stephen Davies, a UK-based PR professional and blogger, has called for the PR industry to stop polluting inboxes with irrelevant emails. He's even made a video "An Inconvenient PR Truth." But spam isn't a tragedy of the commons, it's a tragedy of incompetence. Here are three entirely selfish reasons to stop spamming and start building real relationships.

A Great Twitter Unitasker: ManageTwitter

ManageTwitter does one thing and it does it well: it allows you to unfollow the people who haven't followed you back. This is really useful if you've been following a ton of a people you're just overwhelmed with tweets. This tool allows you to cut the volume of your tweets and engage only with the people who are engaged with you.

Twitter Tool: Nest Unclutterer

Earlier this week I wrote a post about TwitBlock and The Twit Cleaner, tools for quickly unfollowing and blocking spammers on Twitter. Shortly after the post was published PJ Doland, fellow web geek and co-blogger at the Tech Liberation Front hit me up on Twitter with a link to his very own Twitter De-Spamming tool, Nest Unclutterer.

2 Tools to Shut Down Twitter Spam

If you've been using Twitter for more than a few months, you've likely gained some spammy followers and you've also probably ended up following a few people you wish you hadn't. Though a light Twitter user could clear out these issues by giving their lists a few minutes of scrutiny, a heavy users is going to need some help. That's where TwitBlock and The Twit Cleaner come in.

Google Buzz Privacy Updates & 4 Tips for Getting the Most out of Buzz

Google Buzz has only been live for five days, but it's already created controversy, undergone major revamps, and gained millions of users. If this is Google's attempt to take on Facebook and Twitter, it looks as though Google has succeeded in more ways than it might have hoped—in their first week with a live product, the Buzz team has already experienced many of the same growing pains felt by its rivals.

Schedule, Measure, and Automate Tweets with HootSuite

By combining tweet scheduling and tracking with an RSS-to-Twitter function and a full multi-column control panel makes HootSuite the most powerful and Twitter client on the market. Learn why you should be using this incredible solution for tweeting professionals.