PSD Designs

Weebly is looking for layered PSD designs, which they will convert for use on their platform. Contest entries require no HTML or CSS coding.

Expert Panel of Judges

A panel of design experts will select 10 finalists. Then Weebly users will vote on the finalists to determine the winners. First Place wins $10,000, Second Place receives $2,000, and Third Place gets $1,000.

Opportunity Beyond Winning

Even entries that do not win, may have a chance of being adopted into Weebly’s collection of free themes made available to their users. Such themes include a link to the designer’s profile page with their website/portfolio address, and designer credit is given in the theme’s source code.

There’s opportunity for many with this theme design contest. Watch a video about the competition and get more details at the contest site. The deadline to enter is April 30, 2010.

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Enter video posting. It fits the bill on all three points.

Fast Post Production

With a cool video, you can whip up a post fast and easy. Write a brief paragraph or two, ask a question related to the video content, and voilà! You have an original short post accompanied by an entertaining video, which may spark commentary.

Tools for Video Post Workflow

I like collecting videos with VodPod. The basic service is free. You can use the VodPod browser button to save a video from most video services, and write a blurb for it while it’s fresh in your mind – all in one easy step. Granted, the blurb may be too long for a video player caption, but it’s saved safely in your VodPod library where you can access it later to copy/paste it into a video post.

There are several VodPod video plugins that vary from page galleries to post embeds. VodPod provides gallery and video sidebar widgets.

But the simple way to insert a video into a post is to copy the embed code and paste it into the HTML tab while editing. No plugin required!

Ease Burden of Frequent Publication

Whatever services or tools used, video posting eases the burden of frequent publishing for webmasters. At the same time, it offers readers something quick and visual to enjoy.

I will probably use video posts often at àlaFurBabies. They’re especially fitting for a niche blog targeting pet-lovers. Pet videos are abundant, and people love to watch them. If you like, take a look at the first video post at àlaFurBabies. It’s about an amazing cat who plays the piano. (Really!)

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àlaBuzz accepts guest post submissions, and àlaFurBabies accepts pet stories. Both sites need a contact form that can handle email attachments. Enter Contact Form 7, a rare find. It is the only WordPress contact form plugin that allows users to upload files, such as photos or documents….But not without puzzlement on my part.

Easy to Configure?

Lots of bloggers use Contact Form 7. Everyone brags how easy it is to configure. Pages of documentation are provided. Yet I tell you: Configuring the plugin for file uploading is NOT a straight forward process. After two days of examining how-to documentation, and searching the WP support forum for this plugin, it was by trial and error that I finally got it to work.

English is not the first language of plugin author, Takayuki Miyoshi, but aside from a little confusing sentence structure here and there, he does a pretty darn good job of explaining how to use his plugin. If only I understood tag structure.

Searching for Clues

I’m just a blogger, not a coder. Therefore, I searched the WordPress support forum for clues. Pfffft. There are 29 pages of questions. Too many replies, when there are any at all, chastise: “Read documentation first!”

Googling, I found several sites that explained how to configure Contact Form 7. Mostly they explained the obvious, what even I had figured out. But by gleaning a useful tidbit here and there, I was finally able to get the file upload tag to function. (Then I collapsed with exhaustion.)

Configuration Shortcut

TIP: When configuring Contact Form 7, ignore the Generate Tag drop-down box to the right of the Form tags section (at least for file uploads). Simply add the [file your-file] tag similar to this:

<p>Upload Photo<br />
[file your-file] </p>

Below the Form section, you’ll see the Mail section. Do not enter the file tag in the area to the right of it.

Send the Light!

When I gather strength, I will attempt to configure the contact forms to accept more than one file upload (so submitters can include more than a single photo). I will also try to implement CAPTCHA. Meanwhile, would you please bathe me in the light?

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….OK. This plugin automatically tweets the title of the post, and only the title. I wonder what would have happened if I had entered an excerpt?

….The Tweetable plugin DOES NOT tweet post edits. Good. It also DOES NOT tweet post excerpts. This mean titles need to be really compelling (I need to work on that anyway).

No URL shortening service accounts are necessary. Nothing needs to be checked, entered or configured in the post editing panel. Very simple. Good.

Now, what is the Tweetable’s widget like?….Wow! It looks great; see it on the About Page. It’s well-formatted; completely blends with theme design and conforms beautifully to various sidebar widths.

In conclusion, the Tweetable plugin is a very simple way to automatically tweet your post titles along with a post link. Given that no other text is utilized, it kinda forces you to write more descriptive, compelling post titles (a good SEO habit, by the way). The Tweetable widget does the job it is meant to do and appears well-formatted….

….Oh, ho, ho! I thought I was done, but now I see more Tweetable stuff in the admin interface: You can actually post Twitter updates from your admin page in a near replica of the Twitter home page (you’ll see the recent updates from the people you are following).

If that wasn’t enough, with Tweetable you can also:

• Track Twitter promotional effectiveness by adding Google Analytics campaign tags to auto-tweets!
• Add a Tweetmeme button to your page posts!
• Slide a “Tweet This” bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks bar!

In final conclusion, the Tweetable WP plugin offers an awful lot of utility. I’m pleased with everything, except I wish automatic Twitter post updates included at least the beginning of the  post excerpt. Now I am forced to write descriptive, compelling titles that are also short….Or else they won’t look so hot on the blog, given the theme design I use here.

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You must now use Bitly with the WP-to-Twitter plugin (although it still appears to accept Cligs account details). Be sure to check how you enter your Bitly username in the plugin options. It is case-sensitive.

Update: It doesn’t look like it’s working. The tweet to this post is missing the URL link. I will have to investigate later – after all, it’s a holiday. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

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