Twitter: you're doing it right!

Some days Twitter can be such a buzz! What you get out of it is closely correlated to what you put into it, in my experience.

• You’re @replying to multiple people having multiple conversations simultaneously.
• You’re sending direct message to someone to arrange a meetup.
• You’re following a trending topic on twitterfall.com and participating using the hashtag.
• You look at pictures related to the trending topic and make comments on TwitPic.
• You make a blog post, add a link on Delicious, make a comment on 43Things, tick off a task on MyChores, it all gets updated on Twitter.
• You catch onto a meme and help spread it and promote the mashup.

All these things and more have happened to me today! My tweeting activity has earned me 6 new followers, and i started following 2 new people.

In this case the trending topic is #uksnow, and the mashup is benmarsh.co.uk/snow. Make a tweet like this to register your postcode and marks out of ten for snow fall. The map will update automatically!

#uksnow SO23 2/10

The only thing i didn’t do today is re-tweet anybody. I still haven’t got the hang of re-tweeting. I briefly used Twitterfox which made it easy, but i still prefer to go directly to twitter.com for instant results!

GeoURL WordPress plugin now available!

My plugin got approved, and it is available for download here: GeoURL WordPress plugin.

Apparently it has had 18 downloads already. Okay, one of them was me, just testing it zipped up correctly, but even so … have i helped 17 blogs to become GeoURL enabled?! :)

I wish there was a way to tell who has installed it … would be lovely to see it in action for other people!

In other news, Twitter has been so thrilled by the UK snow that the hashtag #uksnow has been at the top of the trending topics all afternoon! It’s quite fun to watch twitterfall.com/#uksnow and see the tweets fly in from around the UK. People are giving marks out of ten for their area, and posting pictures of good snow scenes! :)

We don’t get good snow very often in the UK, and we are predicted 15cm by the morning! That will require wellies to walk to work!! It’s the heaviest snowfall in 6 years apparently, so you can understand why we’re all so excited!

GeoURL – a new WordPress plugin

Whoops, it’s another late night, but … i just wrote a WordPress plugin!

Every time i change my theme i hardcode in the meta tags for GeoURL to detect my location. GeoURL is then able to find other sites that are geographically nearby. It gives me a little button link to use, like this:

The way this works is very simple: just poking these meta tags into the header of my blog page:

Note, that is not *exactly* where i live – it is just somewhere random near the centre of Winchester!

I thought there must be an easier way than hardcoding the meta tags into the theme. I had a look but didn’t find a plugin for it, so i made one myself! :) It allows you to easily add your location coordinates and ping the GeoURL server. Pretty simple, but i’ll find it useful. It’s already working on my own blog and once i get a subversion repository from WordPress, i’ll upload it for sharing! :)