After making our post for January 3, it was off to my favorite forums. That’s where I found six tools mentioned by Owen that he loved using in 2008.

The one that caught my eye is Zemanta, an add-on to your Firefox browser that automatically recognizes your wordpress and/or blogger blogs. It’s a tool that’s going to help suggest photos, videos, articles, etc., related to what you’re writing about – all done from inside your admin area.

Here’s an example:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter Is Stealing Your Password

What the example above shows is something Zemanta considered “related to” the rest of the information in this post (see below about Twitter).  There are many items to choose from, but I just picked this one – all from inside the admin area of this blog.

After installing (and it’s quick and painless and yes I did read the terms of service first), you’ll end up on the welcome page where you’ll get instructions on “how to get started right away” using this super cool tool!

A big thanks to Owen for sharing this and five other tools (one of which he created himself).

Excellent!

And, for those of you wondering why your WordPress Twitter Updater plugin no longer works, well we don’t currently have the answer to that… However, TwitterBar 1.1 may be your easiest solution.

It’s been available since November 1, 2008, tried and tested. Just be sure you know what you’ve got typed in your address bar before you Twitter it. It can be words, the link of the page you’re on, whatever. So double check first

(The Firefox logo was also pulled in using Zemanta.)

A second alternative to get your feeds posted directly to your Twitter account (though the toolbar above is very cool), is TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed requires you to create an OpenSource id. Just be prepared to validate your signup via email AND be adept at picture recognition – the  process is a tad long while you “guess the picture” during the account creation process.

What TwitterFeed will do is, depending on your setting choices, take a peek at your blog feed and post the last “x” amount you designate at the time interval you ask it to check. While that may sound confusing, it’s not – it’s just a fill in the blanks AFTER you get past the picture recognition thing (it’s very hard to explain but worth the trouble).

So there you have it… multiple ways to get your current posts automatically onto Twitter, plus add some graphic interest to your posts painlessly.  Enjoy!

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about this post. So please DO comment!

2CreateAWebsite is one of our favorite blogs, and this morning I finally had the opportunity to play catchup; I’m glad I did!

Have you ever been on a website or blog and wondered, “What in the world is that particular color?”

ColorZilla makes it easy as pie to hover over any color on any webpage and find the exact “ingredients” that make up that particular color.

“With this handy Firefox add-on, you can use the eyedropper tool to hover over any color in your browser and it will display the hex color code.”

After I added it to my Firefox browser, it shows up in the lower right hand corner. Depending on the other addons you’re using, you may have to make some modifications to their settings so you can see the string of code (for example I downplayed some of the SearchStatus features to allow room for the hexidecimal code TO show).

For those truly interested in getting “just the right color,” and keeping in mind that even after you do, it really does all depend on the graphics card and monitor your visitor is using, ColorZilla is the way to go.

There’s even help/documentation files on their website to help you get the most out of using this new color picker addon.

And… it’s free!

Last night while posting about a free PDF creator, I also noticed something unusual about some (not all) of our links here at Online Internet Marketing Strategies. What I noticed was while we have the “dofollow” and “commentluv” plugins on this WordPress blog, they don’t always work properly.

So I went searching for a surefire cure to what we perceive as a problem (we want to give everyone who does comment the benefit of commenting!).

I found… (more…)