Pimp Your Slides Using Prezi.com

Learned about this neat presentation online application called Prezi. 100% online, free to use with some limitations (no private presentations, 100MB limit). Still awesome application, easy to learn and fun to use.

Love it.

Decided to give it a test drive and make a prezi out of my last topic "How To: Use Twitter Feed and Bitly to Promote your Blog"


Sorry about the bad quality images, I just saved them off the sites.



Link to it here or view full size/full screen: http://bit.ly/PoJB3

How To: Use Twitter Feed and Bitly to Promote your Blog

A couple of weeks ago I joined twitter in effort to experiment more with promoting my blog and get a bit more traffic.

Before I get into that, rule number one in generating traffic is

Content is King

Now I am not an expert in advertising via the social media nor advertising via any media, but I have learned a lot about promoting your blog and self using twitter over the past few weeks. As I learn more I will share more.

Seed your blog with content first
Don't start promoting if your blog is empty. Seed it with good, interesting and valuable content. Whether it is advice, comments on something you read in the news, challenges and how you overcame them (or if you did not, then what did you try and did not work) . So have some content on there so that when someone does visit, they are not welcomed by just a few short posts that do not add any value.

Creating good titles for your posts
When you create a post the first title you save it with is used to generate the URL for that post. So titles are very important and a good title will help that content get ranked on search engines and help your blog overall. A good tip I read was to first pick a series of words that will describe the new post best. For this post I picked "Use Twitter Feed Bitly Promote Blog Tips Suggestions". Publish the post with that title and then go back and add a proper title to it.

Join Twitter
Twitter is more than just reading what your friends are up to. Use twitter to stay up to date on news, weather, topics, technology, cars or whatever else interests you. Don't limit your follows to people you know, follow people based on what they are contributing - if what they posted today was valuable to you, odds are something they will post tomorrow will also be valuable. A lot of companies have joined twitter and promote their products and services on twitter. Follow these companies to get updates, news, and even help with their products.

Unlike Facebook where you can get 10,000 friends without even knowing 2% of them, you need to add value for someone to follow you, sure you can follow him, but the idea is to build your online identity; an interesting online identity. If your online identity revolves around following 10,000 people and not adding value then the opportunity you had there will not come again. Celebrities are a special case, even if they don't post that often. (If you are a celebrity and reading this post please leave a comment, if your're not still comment!)

Blog. Check. Twitter. Check. What's next?
So by now you have some good content on your blog, and you have built a small network on Twitter. Now what about Twitter Feed and Bitly?

Twitter Feed
Twitter Feed will publish your posts on Twitter on your behalf. Just sign up for an account and authorize it to do so by providing your username and password for Twitter or by authenticating your Twitter Feed username with Twitter. You can configure how often you want it to check your posts and what to prefix each post with.
Most if not every blogging tool provides you with a URL where your blog's RSS feed is published to. Simple point TwitterFeed to that RSS Feed and you are done.

Why use #hashtag for your blog posts?
I used #NESBlog to prefix my blog tweets giving me a way to easily search Twitter and see if any of my posts were retweeted. None so far, but I only started this yesterday. I'm optimistic I'll get my moment of fame sooner or later.

bit.ly
bit.ly is a url shortener. It also allows you to track each url and see how visits each got. Sign up for an account and configure TwitterFeed to use your bit.ly username and API key. There are many other services that do this, bit.ly was just the first I signed up for and so far its working out well.

Next time TwitterFeed reads your blog's RSS feed it will send your last post as:


Note: If your posts show up on twitter with a "You must be authentication to a ..." the bit.ly API key is incorrect. Copy it and paste it back in again carefully.

That covers the set of tips I learned over the past few weeks at promoting my blog using Twitter, Twitter Feed, and Bitly url shortening.

Don't forget to comment and let me know what you think or share some other tips!

PhotoMap: Snap, Grab and Walk away

Following an earlier post about improving university campus maps I found this neat mobile application that allows you to make better use of a physical map.

Basically you snap a photo of the map whether its at a theme park, mall or university and have the application read your phone's GPS coordinates at two landmarks and mark the landmarks on the image.

Now you can walk around and follow yourself on that map. Definitely a handy little app to have next time you are feeling like a tourist or a freshman on a campus on your first day of classes.

Twitter Mail and Blogger Atlast

Since I joined twitter a few weeks back I have been trying to figure out how to get my posts here automatically tweeted without me having to tweet each one individually. I was going about it the wrong way, I was looking for a widget that would do this.

I was just looking over my settings and I noticed this "send posts to e-mail" field where I had my own email in there to get my own copy of my posts somewhere other than just blogger.com. That's when I had an 'Aha' moment and decided to look for a service that would provide me with an e-mail and they would post the e-mail message to twitter - enter TwitterMail.

You login with your twitter credentials and then you can pick your email address @twittermail.com
(something long and that you cannot remember)

Then give that e-mail to blogger and bookmark it in gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or outlook if you are still using that - so you can use it there too.

So this post is a test of this process.

There is also twitterfeed that I have seen people use, so thats always another option.

Upgrade your university's campus map

One of the recent projects we worked on was a campus map for the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). The great thing about this map, is that it is not the usual image or PDF map that seems to be the standard on a lot of universities' websites:

For example the McMaster University Campus and the University of Toronto Campus use images along side image maps and tables to present information.

There are some universities with more interactive maps such as MIT's beta campus map which utilizes the Google Maps platform. This is a good sign and hopefully means the days of maps delivered via PDF or images are numbered.

Google Maps includes a lot of information pertaining the location you search, for example if we search "University of Ottawa" on Google Maps we would get the following:


View Larger Map

This is great stuff that Google provides, but it won't fly with universities although it is already miles ahead of an image map, it does not deliver the required content one would hope to find on a campus map. There is also very little you can do to brand it, customize the look and control the data. For example a big problem with Google Maps, is the data can get old and an old map is useless when its missing the new Faculty of Engineering building at McMaster University.

Onto the good stuff, the Google Map is one right path, but we want more control over the data. What if we want to provide routing between buildings? You might say "wait a minute, Google Maps already does that", but what if we want to route through buildings, along overpasses or even between buildings? What if we want to allow the student to pick whether they want to see the shortest route or the warmest route? Where are the wheelchair accesses?

Now I leave you to the following demonstration: (Thanks to Tim Merrill for putting this demo together - and for the record the background music is perfect)

Neti Pot

This may be a strange post and certainly not a topic I usually rant about, but this thing is ingenious!

I came down with a bad flu, cough and the works last Thursday and been on a bunch of meds but this one really clears out the sinuses. Its a weird feeling, but it works. *Atchoo!*

The first McMaster website? possibly

I just came across the internet archive - WayBack Machine. Always wondered how the first websites for different companies and organizations looked like.

This is the first McMaster site for everybody I know who studied there, or is still there:


The first Google.com site. What is really interesting, is that Google remained mainly consistent and they maintained the simplistic approach from the start.

The first Yahoo! website. Again interesting, Yahoo! did not believe in simplistic designs from day one. In fact their site just got even more complicated over the past 13 years.

And finally, who remembers the first Etisalat website?

So much can change in 10 years, who knows what the world will be like in another 10.