I reported last night that the Twittley 12.2 version of the wordpress plug-in was broken and the developer promptly released version 12.2.1 which resolved the issue, I had some initial trouble with the plug-in but after re-activating it about a half our later, all seems to be working.  So you can now reactivate your twittley wordpress plug-ins everyone.

-Dragon Blogger

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I was using Paint.NET the other day and wanted to see what it would be like to leverage the screen capture of CamStudio with the ability to create animated video’s showing effects you can apply in Paint.Net program, I came up with something that was fairly interesting, but I wish I could somehow convert this to animated GIF file so it could load on a page and constantly repeat.  This is my first experiment with capturing live effects applied to a Paint.Net image in real time.

Here is my first experiment, how do you think it looks? I think it staggers a little bit, I am still trying to experiment on the best way to save multiple jpg files and then pull them all together to make an animated gif or movie.

-Dragon Blogger

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Upgraded Twittley Plug-in for wordpress on all 3 of my blogs and immediately was faced with crushing PHP errors that defuncted the format of my blog.

Warning: include() [function.include]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /xxx/xxxxx/dragonblogger.com/wp-content/plugins/twittley-button/twittley.php on line 244

Warning: include(http://test.twittley.com/wp-includes/category-template.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /xxx/xxxx/dragonblogger.com/wp-content/plugins/twittley-button/twittley.php on line 244

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘http://test.twittley.com/wp-includes/category-template.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php5/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /xxx/xxxx/dragonblogger.com/wp-content/plugins/twittley-button/twittley.php on line 244

I had no choice but to disable Twittley and replace with Tweetmeme until the issue is resolved, I contacted the company, but the ContactMe page on the Twittley website appears to not be functioning as it gives no contact email or information at all when I click on it with Firefox 3.5.

It appeared the new version was to try and automatically determine categories to make it easier to submit your post to Twittley, and I hope they get this resolved soon.

• Update:

The creators released version 12.2.1 very quickly which addressed the php plug-in issues, but when I upgraded and used the latest version the twittley image and logo did not display on my blog, only a blank image was left in its place.

-Dragon Blogger

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In reviewing Twitter applications I delved into a few Twitter Pyramid sites, mostly on accident not realizing what I was joining, but I should have known better.

TwitterTrain.info and Tweeterfollow.com and tweeteradder.com are all examples of Pyramid Sites, where you join and follow a bunch of people and each person subsequently joins and follows the train. You cannot attract quality followers this way, and whats worse, these sites hijack your twitter account and password. Instead of registering as an application you can remove from Twitter connections directly, these programs save your account/password and post tweets to your followers automatically promoting their site.

This type of spam message can lose you followers you had before, so when I tried to figure out how to remove Tweeterfollow.com, I went to the Contact us link and they post the following disclaimer:

Contact:

* IF YOU WANT TO STOP US FROM PROMOTING ON YOUR ACCOUNT PLEASE LOGIN THE SITE AND AT THE BOTTOM HIT CLOSE ACCOUNT. PLEASE DONT EMAIL US ABOUT THIS ISSUE. ONCE YOU LOGIN AT THE BOTTOM YOU WILL SEE CLOSE ACCOUNT AND YOU WONT GET THE MESSAGES AGAIN. IF THAT DONT WORK JUST CHANGE PASSWORD AND NEXT TIME READ THE RULES ON THE SITE BEFORE YOU SIGN IN AGAIN.
* CONTACT US AT CONTACT@TWEETERFOLLOW.COM

This type of disclaimer clearly means many people signed up, joined without reading the fine lines, and wanted out. I closed my account, but not thinking it sufficient enough I changed my twitter password as well.

Be warned some sites don’t even provide the ability to remove your account, or have you sign in again with your twitter ID/password to remove the account, but don’t actually remove you. There are only 2 ways to recover your account if you are sucked into some of these sites:

#1 – Go to your Twitter Profile Settings, click on Connections and revoke any applications that you don’t know
#2 – Change your twitter password to something different & secure (use alpha, number and special characters in your password) something like B0bc@t would be a good password. (don’t use that one)

This should prevent other apps which had your old password from using your account, but they may still make attempts which can cause your twitter account to get locked out, I have not figured out how to resolve this part yet.

Let this be a lesson to everyone, don’t try to join Twitter trains, mass follower sites, or anything promoting getting mass followers, it is like one big Twitter Ponzi Scheme.

-Dragon Blogger

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The Twittley team contacted me and mentioned that you should claim your domain with Twittley if you use the plug-in for wordpress and the benefits it provide are:
Once you’re the verified owner of that domain, any link posted to that domain on Twittley will contain a Follow this Webmaster link that a user can click to automatically follow you on Twitter.

To claim your domain you need to do the following:

• Submit your post via Twittley, then after you click submit, click on the “Claim Domain” link

• Then you asked to create a file on your web server at the root level, and input the URL and Twitter account that claims the domain.

• So you log into your server, create the file and update the application:

• And then your domain is claimed.

Some other tips to follow from the Twittley team are:

• Always submit your post to twittley the 1st time, since the first submitter sets the tags, description and category and nobody knows the content like the author, this also means that people who click the “tweet” button won’t be redirected off of your page to fill out this information.

• Make the button stand out in a prominent portion of your web page, the top is good, but bottom can work too for long articles where you want the reader to see the button when they are done reading.

• To make the button stand out more, minimize the amount of large buttons you use on a post, I see some blogs with Tweetmeme and Twittley buttons which do the same thing, and I think it really gums up a blog post to have multiple buttons that do the same thing on the same post.

-Dragon Blogger

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