Chris K Designs

I have made this an official plugin and you can visit the page for this plugin by visiting Twitter Tools – X.co URLs

So the other day GoDaddy.com released it’s new URL shortener x.co. They’ve also built in an API, so from that, we can now use the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin with the x.co URL Shortener. I’ve hacked together a file based off the Twitter Tools bit.ly plugin that works in conjunction with the main Twitter Tools plugin without any issues that I’ve noticed so far. For now you need to do the following:

1. An account with x.co (which is the same as a GoDaddy.com account or using the steps listed below in the update)
2. Install Twitter Tools for WordPress
3. Download this .zip file and extract it into wp-content/plugins/
4. Activate the Twitter Tools – x.co URLs plugin from your plugins list
5. Login to your x.co account and click on the ‘Settings’ tab, copy down your API Key.
6. From the ‘Settings’ menu select ‘Twitter Tools’ and you will need to enter your X.co API Key.
7. That’s it, you are ready to tweet your posts with x.co shortened URLs!

If you have any feedback let me know and I’d be glad to see what I can do to help you out. I will try and get this up on WordPress.org within the next day or two for installation directly in your WordPress admin area.

Update:
You do not need a GoDaddy Account to use x.co. You can use the following steps:

To sign up for X.CO

1. Go to X.CO.
2. If you have a Go Daddy account, log in with your user name and password.
3. If you don’t have a Go Daddy account, on the bottom-left of the screen, click Sign Up for a Free Account.
4. In the To Create a New Account form, enter your information and create a password.
5. When finished, click Create a New Account.

So last night I got the chance to finally see Diggnation at a live shoot here in Tempe at the Tempe Center for the Preforming Arts. I showed up at 3PM and ended up getting front row seats! I met some awesome people from all over the place including a guy who flew in from New Jersey to see the show. I took tons of pics over and put them up on my Flickr account. Some of them aren’t the greatest thanks to the stock flash on my Digital Rebel but they work. Below are some of my favorites from the show.

The biggest complaint I hear from people who use MySQL driven sites on inexpensive shared hosting services is a decrease in performance over time. Most of the time this decrease is no fault of your hosting provider, but the cluttering of your database.

Like any computer storage device, a database is simply a collection of data that through time, use, and abuse can grow unorganized and cluttered. I uncovered a few scripts people had written in this article at noupe.com. Not only did I want to have my databases optimized, I also wanted the backups to be created. So what I have in for your enjoyment is a script that will optimize your database, backup the database to a file including the timestamp (to avoid overwriting), and it will also email you upon warnings and errors.

To install this script you place it in a folder that you can call something like ‘supersecretfoldername’ and put a password on this folder. When the script is run it places a backup in a folder named ‘_db_backups’ in the directory parent to the ‘supersecretfoldername’ folder.

As a bonus, if you use this in conjunction with GoDaddy hosting services, you can use this as a Cron Script to be run without your interaction and the backups will be in GoDaddy’s default database backup folder. GoDaddy’s Hosting Control Center will also email you the script results as part of their Cron Manager interface.

Download the script.

If you are using GoDaddy you will want to set the file permissions to ‘Executable’ through their ‘File Manager’ (Help Article). You can then use the ‘Cron Manager’ from within the ‘Content’ section of your Hosting Control Center. Here you can set the email address they will send your results to, your scripts, and their frequency

Most of us get the whole Twitter idea. Some, still can’t grasp it. This week Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com, put a video up on his blog explaining Twitter is possibly the most simple way. Check it out below. When you are done watching, head over to bobparsons.me for more videos and blog posts from Bob.

When you are done, go ahead and follow me on twitter @cklosowski.

Video after the break. Continue reading “Still don’t get this Twitter thing?” »