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jethro's picture

BuzzGrowl shows social media about your website on your website

BuzzGrowl is a pretty cool plugin that's very easy to install on any website. It creates a floating bottom right corner box that searches for and displays social media commentary about the site you are on. It provides easy ways for people to see the commentary about your site and participate by sharing on Facebook, tweeting or retweeting others comments.

I was able to install it in under 5 minutes, its a simple script that needs to be added to your page. Get your script from BuzzGrowl.

Here's some of what people have been saying about it:

BuzzGrowl is a premium answer to onsite social media engagement. If you're a small blog, you'll love it. - Brad McCarty, Editor, TheNextWeb
Many site owners will be interested in using [Buzz Growl]. Website publishers will love it. - Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Editor, ReadWriteWeb

And here is a video about it.

About BuzzGrowl
jethro's picture

QLDfloods.org website

What have I been doing this week?

Running a volunteer project assisting with the terrible natural disaster flooding here in Queensland Australia.

I started www.qldfloods.org website on Tuesday morning as the rains came down. I asked on some technical forums for some assistance and next thing i know its 4 days later and I'm still in my office.

The site provides a one stop hub for resources and news and a bed matching facility for displaced people staying in evacuation centres with people offering space in their homes for them.

I am estimating some 50+ hours for myself and another 100 for my staff. The other volunteers have probably put in 600 plus hours. We have been on national TV at least three times, numerous radio interviews and also on CNN.

The site now has registered nearly 700 families and close to 2000 beds available for temporary accommodation - individual Queenslanders prepared to make room in their homes for strangers to come and stay.

This is my chart of what I've have been doing thanks to RescueTime.

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I wanted to shout out to the helpers and sponsors - without whom this project would not have been possible

Thousands of dollars worth of servers in a server farm provided by OntheNet - 5 servers altogether and hours of time to put it together.

jethro's picture

Using Site Verify and XML Sitemap in Drupal to enhance SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are very important for websites to hit that coveted number number 1 spot on related keyword searches.

With Drupal there are some specific tools that can assist with this. The major Search Engines, (Yahoo, Bing and Google) provide tools to do this and there are some Drupal modules that work with this.

The following process takes you through the entire process - excluding signing up for the accounts at Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Before starting make accounts (or sign in with your existing accounts) to each of these services:

Then make sure you have a current download of these modules:

jethro's picture

Tech Talk Christmas Summary

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

ExcelMicrosoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

OutlookMicrosoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.