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WPZOOM Social Media Icon Set

Jaypee Habaradas — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:50:31 +0000

If you liked the free Developer icon set released by WPZOOM a couple months back, I’m sure you’re also gonna like their newest icon set – the WPZOOM Social Media Icon Set. It features 50 beautifully designed icons for popular social websites like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and Flickr just to mention a few.

Here’s a preview of the icons included in the Social Media Icon Set:

Each icon in the WPZOOM Social Media icon set is available in two different sizes: 26×26 pixels and 38×38 pixels and two different file formats: PNG and PSD source files. The icons in this set were designed by Umar Irshad, a web designer from Pakistan.

The WPZOOM Social Media Icon Set is FREE to download and can be used anywhere you want. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you decide to use or share this icon set, the author will appreciate if you link back to this article or to the author’s website.

Kudos to WPZOOM for sharing another free beautiful icon set and also to Umar for doing a great job with the icons.

Download the WPZOOM Social Media Icon Set

Weekend Roundup #100

Jaypee Habaradas — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:17:30 +0000

Hi everyone! It’s good to be back after being away from my blog for a week. For those who don’t know, my family and I went on a road trip from California to Maryland which is about 2,600+ miles, 40+ hours of driving and took us 5 days & 4 nights (including stopovers). My apologies for the lack of updates. I wasn’t able to post updates because I didn’t have any Internet connection and I couldn’t login to my WordPress dashboard on my iPhone because the latest update of the WordPress for iOS (iPhone/iPad) was broken.

I also wasn’t able to publish last week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup because I was very busy packing stuff and getting ready for our trip. I planned on scheduling posts for last week but wasn’t able to prepare any drafts/posts because of the busy schedule. I was also planning on posting a few guest posts from blogger friends but that too didn’t work out.

I’ll do my best to make it up to you guys with several updates in the coming days. I’ll also be posting a blog contest/giveaway so watch out for it. Hope you folks enjoy this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup! Btw, this week’s edition is kinda “special” because it is the 100th edition of the Weekend Roundup.

Blogging

WordPress

SEO

Technology

Gadgets

Pinoy Blogs

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Like it? Tweet it!

Jaypee Habaradas — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:41:23 +0000

Do you have a lot of visitors from Twitter or loyal readers who like to share content to Twitter? Then you probably want to make it easy for these people to share your site or blog post with their friends/followers on Twitter, right? Introducing Like it? Tweet it?, a jQuery-powered widget that enables your readers and visitors to tweet about your blog/website directly in a box displayed in the corner of the site keeping them in your site and sparing them the hassles of pop-up windows.

The Like it? Tweet it? widget automatically includes the link to the site or post and lets the user customize the message, avoiding auto-tweets that many Twitter users dislike.

Screenshots:
Before connecting to Twitter

After connecting to Twitter

Before you can use the Like it? Tweet it? widget, make sure that you “Connect” and authorize it to access your Twitter account. This widget is based on Twitter’s @anywhere API so signing in is seamless and once signed in, users are signed in on all Like it? Tweet it? widget boxes anywhere in the Internet.

Like it? Tweet it? Can be installed on any website or blog. You don’t need any API key and you don’t have to download any files. All you need is to insert a piece of code into the section of the HTML and jQuery installed on your website to make it run. If you have a WordPress blog and you don’t want to get your hands messy, there is a Like it? Tweet it? WordPress plugin that you can download and install.

Like it? Tweet it? has lots of customization options enabling you to play with it and make the Like it? Tweet it? widget look the way you want it to and make it blend with your site design/layout. The Like it? Tweet it? widget was created by Andy Graulund of Pongsocket.

For further information and specific installation instructions for WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger, head over to the Like it? Tweet it? site.

What do you guys think of the Like it? Tweet it? widget? Anybody here using it or have tried it on their blog/website?

FTC Implement Tougher Guidelines for Blog Endorsements/Disclosure

Jaypee Habaradas — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:26:04 +0000

One of the hottest topics/stories in the blogosphere yesterday was about the new guidelines implemented by the FTC or Federal Trade Commission regarding blogger and celebrity endorsements, testimonials and disclosures. The FTC Guides were last updated back in 1980 and this is the first time the Guides were amended in 29 years.

Here’s an excerpt from the updated FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials:

Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.
Celebrity endorsers also are addressed in the revised Guides. While the 1980 Guides did not explicitly state that endorsers as well as advertisers could be liable under the FTC Act for statements they make in an endorsement, the revised Guides reflect Commission case law and clearly state that both advertisers and endorsers may be liable for false or unsubstantiated claims made in an endorsement – or for failure to disclose material connections between the advertiser and endorsers. The revised Guides also make it clear that celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

Read full article here.

So what it basically says is that bloggers or celebrities who do endorsements must properly or fully disclose any payments (cash or in kind) they’ve received from companies or entities in exchange for those endorsements/reviews. Failure to do so could cost the guilty party a penalty of $11,000 per violation. It also means that aside from pay-per-post reviews, any reviews, endorsements or testimonials that involve freebies, are now required to be disclosed. The only thing that’s unclear with these new set of guidelines is where should the blogger post or display the disclosure? Should it be in each individual post or in a disclosure page? Also, should the blogger disclose what compensation they received?

I haven’t done paid reviews in a long time but as a blogger whose done paid reviews/endorsements in the past, I don’t mind having this new guidelines. I believe in creating and developing a trustworthy and honest relationship with my blog readers and visitors. I make sure that I point out that a certain post is a paid review and I also have a Disclosure Policy here on my blog. In the event that I receive compensation for reviews and endorsements, I make it a point that I try out the product/service first and that I publish my honest and personal opinion about the product.

I’m not an expert on legal issues but from what I understand, this new guidelines would only affect bloggers in the US, right? The FTC will surely have a hard time policing the millions of blogs in the Internet. Maybe they’ll start with the A-list bloggers and work their way down to other bloggers. Btw, from what I’ve read in the various articles and from the Guides itself, this new set of guidelines also cover Twitter, Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages) and other forms of social media.

How about you guys? What do you think about the FTC’s new guidelines regarding blogger and celebrity endorsements, reviews, testimonials and disclosures? For those of you who do paid reviews and receive compensation for product reviews and endorsements, do you like this new guidelines set by the FTC? For the consumers, what type of disclosure do you expect from bloggers who endorse products and services? Do you want it on individual posts or just a one page blog disclosure policy? Please share your thoughts.

HowTo: Move from Blogger to WordPress Part II

Gemma Baltazar — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:47:57 +0000

This is a guest post by Gemma Baltazar of The Lady Programmer. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

As promised, here’s Part 2 of How To Move from Blogger to WordPress. In Part 1, we discussed about the requirements, preparing your WordPress blog and importing the Blogger content to your WordPress blog. This time, we’ll talk about how to set up the permalinks, setting up your blog’s appearance, setting up the custom domain (if you have one) and the rest of the steps that will help you move your blog from Blogger to WordPress.

Now, lets continue…

Setting up the Permalinks

1. Change the permalink settings by going to Settings > Permalinks and entering the custom permalink as shown below. If you are a careful observer, you should notice that Blogger’s permalinks is different to that of WordPress. It is important to map the new permalinks to the old Blogger’s posts – again, so that search engines would not penalize your blog for duplicate content.

2. Even if you had changed the permalink format in Settings > Permalinks, this is not enough. Some permalinks don’t show up correctly, like the one below: Blogger’s permalinks are always truncated!

Blogger’s truncated permalink

WordPress’s full permalink when custom structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html is applied

To solve this truncation problem, I used Maintain Blogger Permalinks plugin. This plugin saved me time from manually modifying those posts to make it similar to Blogger’s permalinks. The step-by-step instructions for using this plugin are written on Maintain Permalinks moving from Blogger to WordPress and the download link is provided along those steps.

Setting up Your Blog’s Appearance

1. If you wish to use another theme, upload the theme via FTP into wp-content/themes folder. Once that the theme is uploaded, activate it via Appearance > Themes.

2. Install all the plugins that you wish to use with your blog. Some recommended plugins are Akismet (for catching spam) and WP-DBManager (for automatically create scheduled backups of the entire blog).

3. Make all the necessary tweaks that you need to put into your blog by adding widgets, installing site analytics code, etc.

Setting up the Custom Domain

(Skip this step if you are not using a custom domain)
1. If you wish to use a custom domain (which is highly recommended), get back to your web host and link the subfolder to your domain. In Fatcow’s Cpanel in this example, I am trying to connect http://testsite.fatcow.com/singleparent via the Domain Pointing Manager. Different CPanels have different instructions on how to configure this one.

2. Again, for those who are using custom domains, change the nameservers configured for your custom domain. The nameservers are given by the webhost and these are needed to be entered into the domain manager. In my case, I had to take the nameservers from Fatcow and enter them into my GoDaddy’s domain manager. If you are using the old Blogspot URL, you may have to add its URL under Forwarding using 301 redirect. You may have to wait up to 24 hours to see the change. While waiting for this one, you may want to do the next step.

3. Since you have built some content and credibility on your old Blogger blog, you don’t have to delete it. You can use it to host existing images, which is actually what I exactly did. Another very important purpose is for retaining the old Blogger address while using the new custom domain. To make this possible I had to install another plugin called Blogger Redirector and set the custom domain in Blogger, as seen on the screenshot below:

I have it working right now on my freelance blog, try typing http://theladyprogrammer.blogspot.com and it will prompt you to the new URL.

4. Once that you are able to see the new WordPress blog, you can now let search engines visit it. Do that by changing Settings > Privacy and choose “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”.

5. Get back to your old Blogger blog dashboard and turn off the capability for search engines to crawl it. Go to Settings > Basic and set “Let Search Engines find your Blog” to NO.

Hope that you liked this 2-part comprehensive guide on how to move from Blogger to WordPress and that it will help you make that transition easier.