Author: masnun

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Uncategorized

Using LinksAlpha for Network Publishing

Are you a social guy? Do you like sharing your blog with your contacts, friends or followers? How do you do that? 🙂

I try to be as much social as I can be. This is the arena of “social business” and I don’t wanna miss the extra traffic I get from my online society. Yes, social networks could be a very good source of online traffic; not to mention that additional help you get from companies like The Marketing Heaven to increase the inflow of traffic. The people who follow you on twitter or connect you on facebook usually share similar likes / dislikes. Typically these people would interact with your contents and spend time on your blog. The drawback is you have to keep them updated about new contents on your site. I linked my Twitter to Facebook and used to share new posts on Twitter and occasionally on both networks.

But do you feel comfortable with manually sharing your posts? No? Keep reading! I came across LinksAlpha.com. It collects data from your websites and publish the contents on your social networks with your username / account. Guess what, they even have a nice WP plugin.

First go to linksalpha.com and get an account. I used Google OpenID. Then add your social networks. In the free version you can add up to 5 networks. I added one facebook fan page, my facebook profile and my twitter.

Then install the “network publisher” plugin into WP. This plugin will ask you for API Keys. These keys are auto generated when you connect to a network on LinksAlpha. Please note the API key for each of the networks and add them one after one in the WP plugin settings.

Now you’re done! Whenever you make a new blog post, your world knows about it! 😀

Categories
Uncategorized

Embedding Youtube Videos using iFrame

With a new URL structure, it’s really easy to embed any youtube video on a webpage. This is what you need to do:

  1. Get the video identifier. If the “watch” url is “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpVrMMcLfk4” then the
    identifier is “VpVrMMcLfk4”. That is the value of the “v” parameter.
  2. Insert an iFrame with the src = “http://www.youtube.com/embed/< identifier >“

Here’s a code snippet for your copy paste comfort 😀 :

So, how does the video look like? 🙂 Watch it below :

Categories
PHP

Forwarding Google Page Rank to New URL

Hello everyone! 😀

As many of you might already know that I’ve been blogging for a long time now. First on Blogspot, then on wordpress.com and later to my self hosted wordpress 🙂 A few days back, I purchased a new domain — http://masnun.me is the new URL. I first hosted it on Google App Engine and kept my wordpress blog on masnun.com. I wrote a custom publication engine on GAE to make posts. I added a good number of features to it. But later I realized that GAE has no support for full text search. This pissed me off! I know I can hack to bypass that restriction (may be storing all keywords in a StringList type) but WordPress is amazing! Moreover, I realized that WP is already seo google, has a Google page rank 3 and most importantly earns me money from advertisements.

I finally decided to host masnun.me on my Umbrahosting account. Installed a fresh copy of WordPress, imported all previous data and then deleted the old blog. But what about the search engine factor? The previous blog had PR3 while the new one is not yet recognized in Google 🙁 Well, looks like I’m not out of luck properly. If Google finds certain URLs to forward to a new location with a “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” response header, it’ll crawl the new pages and forward all attributes (PageRank included) to the new URL.

So, in my previous WP Directory, I have kept my WordPress .htaccess file intact and changed the contents of the index.php file to send a “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” header and then forward to the new URL.

Here’s the code:

Update: If your blog was on a sub directory – “blog”, delete that directory and put the following codes in the index.php file on the root of your previous URL:

It’s working just fine! 🙂