Brice Cheddarn Development

Twitter recently launched a new Follow Button, enabling users to subscribe to the Twitter feeds of companies and individuals directly from their websites.  Users are still be able to preview Twitter profiles before opting to follow them by clicking the username next to the button.  

Before this new button, bloggers and developers had to redirect users to their accounts on Twitter before they could opt to follow.  Now users can subscribe with a single click

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A few months ago, I was contacted about developing a plugin for Simon Hine of HineSight Development in Australia. Simon wanted something that would allow him to play podcast files within a blog post. It seemed like a fun little project, so we developed a rough plan for a simple plugin that would play an MP3 file using a basic audio player from Google.

A simple plugin solution was developed.  The plugin was developed to play an MP3 file within a blog post using a few tags within a post or a page.   The plugin replaces the tags to display a Google audio player that will play an MP3 file within the post content.

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Recently, Facebook announced that the Like/Recommend functionality will replace the traditional share buttons that many website owners had incorporated into their websites.

Many people had already begun to switch out the Share button in favor of the Like button, despite the fact that the new "like" functionality didn't share as much information on a user's stream.  However, shortly after Facebook made their announcement, users started to notice that their "likes" were being featured in their stream just like the share functionality did.

For those who live in a cave, the Like/Recommend button lets a Facebook user share content with friends on the popular social networking site. When a user clicks the Like button on a website, that article appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to the article.  

The change enhanced the visibility of people’s “likes” by adding thumbnails and meta data from Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol.  This means that when a visitor likes or recommends a page on the web using the button, the functionality sends the relevant meta data from that page back to the user's stream, complete with image and short description, for all of their friends to see rather than just a link with a status message.  With this change, Facebook is giving web developers, website owners and social media professionals more control over how their listings show up in streams.

The change also offered up a chance to enhance a piece of Mango Blog functionality.  

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One of the many Mango Blog plugin ideas we've jotted down in recent weeks deals with a new web analytics service called Tynt that allows website owners a way to leverage the power of copy and paste.

Tynt is a service that adds an automatic attribution link to content and images on a site.  When someone copies and pastes text from your web site, Tynt automatically adds a link back to the original article in the Paste. Not only does it help website owners track content and image shares that previously happened without their knowledge, but the link backs also help to drive more traffic back to the site.

One of the most important criteria search engines use to determine how relevant a website is the number and quality of links back to the site.  Tynt automatically generates a link back, which helps to optimize a website without having to be an expert in SEO. 

Tynt enables users to measure engagement by tracking when a visitor copies text or copies an image from the site.  

Many people assume that the most popular way to share content is via Social Media networks like Twitter, Facebook or any of the other sharing tools.  According to Tynt, email is still the easiest and most common way to share content. For every user who clicks a “share this” button, 50 users are sharing by copy and paste.

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Allow me to re-introduce myself and my company.  

I'm Bret, the founder of Brice Cheddarn Development, a web development and consulting studio that focuses on ColdFusion development, search engine optimization, CMS implementation, and a whole lot of other web-related nerdness.  

I unofficially started the company in 2004 while in college pursuing my second degree, then in the summer of 2006 I officially incorporated the company.

Over the years, the company website has been redesigned a couple of times.  The first version of the site was launched in college, and consisted of a few basic HTML pages full of embedded tables that brought a simple design to life.  It was a way to demonstrate to professors and fellow students that I was an aspiring web nerd.  It wasn't a bad site, but still had a hint of late 1990's web design to it. 

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