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Review: Thoughts.com

Do you like to write? How about social networking, blogging, and podcasting? You can do it all at Thoughts.

You can decide how you want to connect with friends and you can do this using various easy-to-use widgets. Here is some of what you can do on thoughts.com:

Create a Blog
Upload Photos and Videos
Upload Podcasts
Create Polls
Participate in Forums
Connect with Friends and other users

Thoughts.com is a place where you can connect with people of like (or unlike) mind and share ideas and discussions. Connect and discuss in the forums, or post your own ideas on your blog. Create photo albums to organize your photos and share them with your friends. You don’t have to rely on different sites for your blogging, photos, and video. With Thoughts.com, you can do it all in one site. You can also upload, download, and listen to podcasts. The forums are an active place to discuss a variety of topics.

If you like to blend your writing and discussions with current events, Thoughts.com has a daily news section where members can discuss these topics. The whole point of the site is to bring people together in a community environment to express their views, learn from others, and come together in an online community.

The interesting thing about Thoughts.com is their “one love policy:”

Thoughts.com is inspired by the belief that there is one universal love that we all share. You are invited to join the community, share your thoughts, enjoy great conversations, and even debate heated issues. The only thing we require is that you are respectful of one another and considerate of the other’s perspective when a point of disagreement arises. Nobody knows everything, and the potential for us to learn is endless if we only allow ourselves to learn. In order to learn, we must be open to new and different ideas.

When I was going through the site researching this review, I must say that I found the forums to be very active. In fact, there were active discussions going on regarding a variety of topics. Lots of people viewing, lots of threads and responses. In short – a very active forum. And since this is all in one active community, you can link this up through one profile connected you and your blog.

As far as the usability of the site, it is your basic community site with bells and whistles. I like the fact that everything is accessible and usable in one place so you don’t have to worry about the friends in your network being able to access or not.

5 social networking sites you haven’t heard of but should be using

By Chad Butler 2 Comments

When I started blogging, most people didn’t even know what a blog was. There was a kind of pioneer spirit; of breaking new ground. As blogging came into its own and the mainstream media began to buzz about it, blogging became a household word. Soon it seemed as if everyone either had a blog, was starting a blog, or at the very least, was reading several blogs. Those that started early found it easier to rise to the top; they had the new thing and the momentum when the trend came.

Then there was social media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg became great places to promote your newly started blog or to find other blogs and bloggers. Now it seems as if everyone is using these sites to promote their blogs. It can be a difficult task to rise to the top with the well known sites. You have to put in some tremendous work upfront to see results. Not that you shouldn’t utilize these sites, you definitely should. But you also need to consider other avenues that, while not as popular now, could be in the future. These sites can help you build traffic and momentum to get your blog noticed.

Squidoo

Squidoo allows you to write pages called “lenses” on squidoo.com. You can publish these pages free.

Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest–and snap it all into focus. Like the lens of a camera, your perspective on something. (You’re looking at a lens right now).

Using Squidoo gives you exposure as an expert on a given topic. But not only can you get exposure (and possibly traffic to your blog), but you can earn money as well. Squidoo gives you a share of the ad revenue generated by your lens(es). If you are cool, you can give your revenue to charity.

Hubpages

Much like Squidoo, Hubpages allows you to publish “hubs” in areas you are knowledgeable. Gain exposure as an expert, generate traffic and an audience, earn a revenue split.

Anyone can be a part of the HubPages community, a leading source of answers and expert content on the web, where even new authors can enjoy hundreds or even thousands of readers. Authors can even earn money through online ads displayed on their hubs.

Plurk

Plurk is a micro-blogging platform like Twitter. But unlike Twitter, Plurk uses a timeline for “plurks” and threads the responses within each plurk. While Plurk is a little behind Twitter in terms of popularity, this shouldn’t be overlooked as an opportunity for social networking.

Reddit

You may have heard of Reddit, but do you use it? Reddit is similar to Digg and StumbleUpon, providing users an opportunity to rate sites and links either up or down. A great place to find interesting links and participate in community.

Tagfoot

Tagfoot combines social bookmarking ala delicious, tagging like Technorati, rating like Digg, and sharing like Stumbleupon. This Squidoo lens describes Tagfoot like this:

I’m not sure if it’s the bastard child of Digg and HubPages or the lovechild of Del.icio.us and Squidoo. But it’s hot, it’s happening and it’s HERE.

A bonus with Tagfoot is that if you use AdSense, you can get 50% of the impressions for your own ads.

Social Links for Your WP Blog: How to Roll Your Own?

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

This is Part 2 of a series. You should read Part 1 before continuing on to this post.

For the sake of this article, I am going to assume that the reader is at the most basic level and doesn’t use any fancy editing tools like Dreamweaver, or even Notepad. We are going to do it all in WP. If you are beyond that level, feel free to adjust accordingly.

In order to make this work, you are going to use some simple WordPress functions. These functions happen within what is known in WordPress as “The Loop.” The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags.

The Loop begins with the following code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

and ends with:

<?php endif; ?>

-OR-

<?php endwhile; else: ?>

For more information on The Loop, see the WordPress Codex. It’s a good idea to get familiar with at least the basics of WordPress, even if you are not “a programmer.” There is a lot of good information in the Codex that is easy to understand, even for a beginner.

In order to get the link and title of a given post, we need to get that information while inside the Loop. We will be using two functions: the_title is used to get the title of the post, while the_permalink gets the location to use for the URL. These are php functions and must be called like this:

<?php the_title(); ?>

(On occasion, you might also use the_excerpt to provide an excerpt of the post. Although for most of the social link submissions, this is an optional field.)

Now that you know about the loop, the_title, and the_url, you are ready to add your social media links to your WP theme.

The easiest way to add this to your theme is through the WP admin. You can edit your theme files under Appearance > Editor. (Make sure you have a back up of your theme files in case you make a mistake or need to roll back for some reason.) Depending on your needs, you may need to edit the following templates:

Main Index Template (index.php)
Page Template (page.php)
Single Post (single.php)

Your theme may or may not have all of these. Some use just index.php. But the essentials are the same.

Let’s start with an easy example, delicious. The format for saving to delicious via a link is http://delicious.com/post?url= the post’s url &title= the post’s title. Using the functions we discussed so that WP can put this information in automagically, it would be done as follows:

<a href="http://delicious.com/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">delicious</a>

You can add this to your theme file where you would like your social media links to appear. Most of the time this is going to be after the post content but before the comments.

Adding other links is just a matter of knowing the format of how that particular service needs to get its submissions. Here are some examples for the more popular choices:

Digg:

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>&amp;bodytext=<?php the_excerpt(); ?>">digg</a>

Facebook:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;t=<?php the_title(); ?>">facebook</a>

Technorati:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<?php the_permalink(); ?>">technorati</a>

Sphinn:

<a href="http://sphinn.com/index.php?c=post&amp;m=submit&amp;link=<?php the_permalink(); ?>">sphinn</a>

Mixx:

<a href="http://www.mixx.com/submit?page_url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">mixx</a>

Google Bookmarks:

<a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&amp;bkmk=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>&amp;annotation=<?php the_excerpt(); ?>">google bookmarks</a>

LinkedIn:

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&amp;url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>&amp;summary=<?php the_excerpt(); ?>">linkedin</a>

MySpace:

<a href="http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;t=<?php the_title(); ?>">myspace</a>

Newsvine:

<a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&amp;save?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;h==<?php the_title(); ?>">newsvine</a>

Reddit:

<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">reddit</a>

Sphereit:

<a href="http://www.sphere.com/search?q=sphereit:<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">sphereit</a>

Stumbleupon:

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">stumbleupon</a>

The advantage of a “roll your own” approach is that you are not limited to the social media links that a plug-in developer has decided to include. If you know the link structure for a particular submission, you can add any site you want and style it any way that you want. This gives you a lot of flexibility and you only really need to do the work one time.

In the upcoming Part 3 of this series, we will discuss how to add images to these links and where to find free icons to use.

Here are some other posts on ButlerBlog that deal with The Loop:

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