photo credit: EMMEALCUBO

Today I went with my wife Ruthie to a WordPress Meetup in Dallas that had the largest attendance I have seen yet at this meetup. I know there were over 100 people there, maybe even 120.

Tony Cecala, the organizer of the meetup somehow arranged for us to meet in this great big room at The Art Institute of Dallas. They had great Wifi, provided food and even made all the set-up and everything for the audio and video for the speaker.

The speaker was Giovanni Gallucci, a social media expert. He spoke for about an hour about social media software, building networks the smart way and tricks of the trade. The talk was highly entertaining, as Giovanni has tons of energy and is very easy going. He even brought his young daughter, who helped collect business cards at the end.

I think everyone that attended came away with at least one great new idea to start working on.

I always wondered how this effect could be done easily. You have seen it before. You click on a section of text or a word and then all this text pops open like magic.

You can put a line of text or entire paragraphs of text here. The expansion will handle lots of text.

When you click on the text above it will expand the box with whatever text you put inside.

I love it when web designers and programmers come up with simple well designed software or WordPress plugin's and this one is great.

Once you have installed the plugin and activated it you just insert a simple tag into the post or page and save. That's it.

Go check it out at the Dagon Designs site.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Recently I was introduced by a fellow Dallas Web Designer, Kat Rice to a very interesting and useful Free Firefox extension called ScribeFire. I met Kat at a Meetup.com group I attend called Dallas Interactive Marketing & Internet SEO SEM Meetup. Yeah, I know, they really need to shorten that name.

I use WordPress for this blog and for 7 other domains I have in my personal and business web site repertoire. ScribeFire makes it very easy for me to manage all 8 WordPress blogs from one tab of my Firefox web browser without having to go log into 8 different blogs in 8 different tabs of the browser. Not that I really would work on all 8 at once, but with ScribeFire I can if I want to.

The extension currently supports 15 different blogging systems. it does not yet support Joomla.

It installs like any other Firefox plugin and then the fun begins. Once you give the extension all the info for logging into each of your blogs then you can begin using the extension.

This extension allows you to write posts, pages, update posts and pages, save a post as a note (basically a draft), easily insert links, easily insert photos and you have full control over categories and tags from each blog you post on.

There is even a Flickr button to easily allow you to search Flickr for a photo for your post and it puts a link to the Flickr page of the photo's owner, which is an ethical and necessary step for using other people's images on your blog.

I like it because it allows me to post from a central place for all my blogs and sites. You have to try ScribeFire yourself to see the huge benefits for your blogging speed.

There is also an ad program that you can subscribe to. This will allow you to put ads on your blog that are targeted to your content. Sort of like Google Adwords, but with a special twist. I have signed up for that free service, but have yet to find the time to devote to using it.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I just started using the really cool WordPress plugin called PhotoDropper.

It essentially let's you harness the power of WordPress, Flickr and the Creative Commons Licensing scheme to use images others have shot and are willing to share (yes, to use on your blog). All you have to do is to adhere to the correct Creative Commons License that is attached to the photo.

You can do the image search from within the Write screen in the WordPress admin area. It will format the pic with links that are needed to comply with the license automatically, plus you get to choose from 3 sizes of the image to insert.

This makes it very easy to find an appropriate image for the theme of your post if you don't already have one in your image library.

The site Skelliewag.org has a great explanation of what these 6 different Creative Commons Licenses are for. I'll just let them it explain that part for you.

Another explanation of using photos from Flickr can be found on Internet Marketing with Josh Spaulding. He goes into a good deal of detail about this topic.