I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has read my posts, commented, linked to me or subscribed to my RSS feed in the past couple of years. I really appreciate it and hope that you have found my ramblings and tweets of interest.

And now for a shameless plea… If I am lucky enough to have a place on your blog roll I’d be extremely grateful if you could take two minutes to update it with my new web address.

For the past few months we have used Twitterfeed to herald new blog posts by Speed staff using the @speedcomms Twitter feed, but recently we have experienced problems with Twitterfeed’s service going down quite regularly. So we are now experimenting with Google’s service.

The ’socialize’ feature uses Google’s new URL shortening service named goo.gl to push blog posts out on Twitter almost instantly. If also offers a couple of interesting options that are above and beyond what Twitterfeed currently offers. It allows users to turn the keywords that they have tagged their blog post with into hashtags, which can help more people to discover your tweets and blog posts by using Twitter Search. The service can also reduce the size of your tweet, making it small enough for other users to retweet and share with their followers.

But there do seem to be a few teething problems at the moment. As not all blog posts are tagged with keywords, some blogging platforms such as WordPress tag them with ‘uncategorized’. Currently Google classes this as a proper keyword and has been tagging tweets with the #uncategorized hashtag.

Will scores of users now migrate from Twitterfeed to Google? Only time will tell, but I suspect that many users will give the new service a try the next time that Twitterfeed goes down.

(Cross posted on the Speed Tech Blog)

Here are two easy steps to make your blog mobile friendly. This script should direct visitors who visit any of the pages on your blog to a main mobile blog site. It is possible to create a fully mobile blog site by creating a specific stylesheet for mobile users using CSS but this is more complex and I haven’t fully worked out how to do it yet. But will blog about it if and when I do.

Step one
Create a mobile blog using Mippin.

Step two
Add the following code inside the head tags. Remove the asterisks and add your mobile blog web address.

<*script type=”text/javascript”>
if (screen.width<=800) { window.location=”http://mippin.com/yourblog” } <*/script>

Hey presto you’ve got a mobile site. Grab your phone and check it out!

From editing client websites to writing blog posts and formatting html newsletters, web design is now a part of PR. Rather than having a digital team to deal with the online stuff, all PRO’s should have a good understanding of web design. PRO’s clearly don’t need to be equipped with the same level of skills as web designers but I think a basic knowledge of web design languages like CSS and HTML would certainly be a good idea.

Another thing I noticed when I updated this site was how quickly it had got out of date. Richard Millington reckons bloggers should update blogrolls weekly and site designs monthly. I agree, udating your blogroll and having a tinker with your site’s design is a great way to keep your blog looking fresh. It’s only been two or three months since I last updated my blog, but in that time Jed Hallam started working at Wolfstar PR, Stephen Davies started 3WPR, and I contributed to an eBook about Digital PR. All of which made parts of my blog and website out of date.

Today this brought up a great website called Who Calls Me. The site lets users report suspect phone numbers belonging to scam artists, telemarketers and other unsolicited callers. Great news for people working in offices where sales calls are a daily annoyance.

For the particular number that rang me there were more than one hundred comments in the last six weeks reporting it as a scam. The site advises to not answer the call or ring back as you could be charged as much as €13 per minute.

Do not answer or reply to calls from this number: +88 213 300 300.