This is a incomplete, random list of tools I use with social networks. Not that I know what I am doing quite yet with social networks. It will take a while. I am just an app, software, and addon junky. So I look for software all the time and usually find something. Be sure and add your own in comments. I will probably try all of them.

First, I would like to invite all of you to Social Median, a different sort of network. It works like Digg, because stories can be "clipped" and commented on. It works like FriendFeed because you follow other "News Makers" and has groups. And it’s new and for some reason I can’t stay away.

Keeping Your Social Profiles Current

• Atomkeep – Yesterday I wrote a post about this one. I really like this service. Keep your profile details in one place and update your social networks and resumes from there. It saves time and helps you avoid multiple personality disorder. I still need to fill out my profile though. Anyone who signs up for the beta gets to keep their account for free.

Streaming Your Social Activities

• Friendfeed – The most popular.
• Profilactic – The most adaptible.
• Swurl – Archive and search your activities.
• OnASwarm – Find friends automatically
• Second Brain – Browse through your content with ease.

What’s News

Sometimes news just does not get around that quick. A story may be popular on a niche social site and may have not made it to StumbleUpon or Digg yet. Most social sites have a an upcoming or new submission page and sometimes this page has feeds. If you are in the right place at the right time, you may spot a story. Sometimes, the daily digests from social networks have stories that you can submit to other networks even a day later. What benefit do you get from this? Possible reciprocation. Getting known as a person who finds great stories and more subscribers to your blog.

Firefox Social Tools

• Shareaholic – Choose from multiple sites to submit to.
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – Self explanatory. One of my favorite sites. So I have a dedicated addon.
• TwitterFox – Not as obtrusive as other addons I have tried.
• ShareThis – Another addon that submits to multiple sites.
• Delicious Bookmarks – A necessity. I only use local bookmarks for logins and the like.
• MySocial 24×7 – For FriendFeed. I wish it would autorefresh
• GreaseMonkey Scripts – Only found these less than a year ago. Look around and search. There are a lot there. You will need this addon to use them.
• The sidebar trick – Screw addons. Do it yourself. The example is for the mobile version of Twitter, but this works for a lot of mobile web sites.
• Bookmarklets – No link. I just add all bookmarklets not covered by one of the tools above into one folder on my bookmark toolbar called "Link". This also has the bookmarklets for posting to my blogs and adding links to their blogrolls.

WordPress Social Tools

• Alinks – Install this plugin and link all your references to social networks to your profiles in every post so your readers can find you elsewhere.
• Disqus Comment System – Comment in the network
• FriendFeed Widget – A lifestream widget.
• Sezwho – Another commenting network.
• Twitter Tools – Notify your followers about new posts among other things.
• Profilactic Widget – I added mine manually, but here is a plugin.
• FriendFeed Plugin - Allows reader to comment on your post via FriendFeed.
• ShareThis – Allows readers to social bookmark your posts at multiple sites without cluttering your site up with button.

Desktop Social Tools

• Twirl – I like the ability to tweek the interface for FriendFeed and Twitter.
• TweetDeck - The ultimate Twitter listening tool with panels.
• Alert Thingy – Detects duplicates from Twitter and FriendFeed and gives you one.
• FeedDemon – A feed reader, but throw your network feeds into one folder to see them all at once

Online Social Tools

• HelloTxt – Notify multiple sites from one spot
• SocialPoster – Bookmark at multiple sites and choose dofollow sites, if you want.
• Ping.fm – Update all of your social networks at once.

Your Social Inbox

I have yet to move everything to Gmail. I still use Thunderbird. I learned about filters long ago. With filters, I find all the comments from my blog, all my friend requests, and my daily digests into one folder. In Thunderbird, go to Tools->Message Filters. Instead of typing an example out, I made a screenshot of my filters. I keep coming up with new ones as I go, so it is not complete.

Not Done Yet

Like I said, an incomplete list. What are your favorite tools?

WordPress plugins don’t stop coming. My initial idea with this blog was to build a set of plugins and then once I thought I was set, download the plugin folder and use it for my other blogs. But, like I said, the cool plugins keep on coming.

So today I took a random walk though the WordPress plugin repository just to see what’s up. No search terms. Just some browsing. And here are some cool plugins I found.

Ad-Minister

A complex ad serving and content plugin. It supports ad-rotation, scheduling, and works with widgets.

Sniplets

A plugin that will automatically insert things in your WordPress blog. That’s the best quick explanation because this plugin does a lot like executing PHP or inserting data from the database. And it will insert these just about anywhere on your blog.

Twitterdoodle

You can get a lot of news before anyone else by following the right people in Twitter or you can use Twitter search to find what people are saying about a topic in real time. Twitterdoodle will automatically add a Twitter search feed as a post at specific intervals of your choosing.

Sensitive Tag Cloud

This plugin presents a context sensitive tag cloud.

Please Link to Me

This plugin gives your visitors the code to link back to your post, right below your article.

Better Nearby Posts Links

"Previous" and "Next" are not good anchor text. Link to your nearby posts with their title. I have been thinking about a "You are here" plugin, that put’s the current post in context with a certain amount of surrounding posts, like the three posts before and the three posts after. Haven’t got around to messing with the concept yet though.

NoFollow Recriprocity

Do unto others. This plugin detects nofollow tags on a commenter’s website and doesn’t give them a dofollow link if they have a nofollow blog.

Post Templates

If you publish the same type of post over and over, this is the plugin for you. With it, you can create templates for your regular postings and stop the copy and paste.

FreshTags

When a user comes to your blog from another blog or a search engine, this plugin will attempt to detect his or her interests and present posts related to the search terms used.

eShop

A WordPress ecommerce plugin that supports downloadable products.

SEO Smart Links

This plugin automatically links keywords and phrases in your post with posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. The plugin finds the link matches by itself and then you edit them.

That’s about it. Not sure which I may install, but each one is interesting and has potential.

I wrote HTML before they really made any good editors for it, back in the old days of 64 colors or however many there were back then. Tables were the only option. You could place something anywhere you wanted to in a page as long as it was in the center, on the right or on the left. And fonts. Forget fonts. A manual typewriter had better fonts.

But that didn’t mean that I didn’t balk and whine once CSS became the new thing. It took me a while. CSS can be a weird animal at times. And just as soon as you think you have created the perfect layout, you get an email saying that people can’t even read your site on IE7. Floats and positioning still throw me for a loop.

So as far as coming up with a new blog design goes, I don’t have the patience much any more. But I do keep a few CSS tips in my head for use in post.

Easy CSS

I didn’t learn this until about a year ago and it’s a life saver at times. About the easiest way to add an extra bit of style to an object like a picture or post level ad is not by editing the stylesheet. If you are going to use the object in only one post, it doesn’t make much sense anyway. It’s extra lines for a browser to process every time it loads a page even though it will only be used in one post.

Just wrap the object in a div. In other words, put <div style=""> before the object and </div> after the object.

Floating Blocks

One of the first things I learned was floats. This was something you couldn’t do with tables and one I am constantly using. The picture on the right has this tag before it: <div style="float: right"> and the ending </div> after it. By changing the right to left, it will float to the other side of this post.

You can also use "align=right" in the beginning image tag to do the same thing. But the first method can be used for a multitude of objects in a post.

Javascript

This can be a pain in the ass at times. I have found a few quick ways around it. One is a plugin that allows you to paste javascript into a post. Another is using a desktop blogging program like Windows Live Writer that allows you to paste it in.

If the bit of javascript is going to be use more often than one post, another solution is using Adsense Manager, pasting the javascript in as a new ad using the "save as code" function that allows you to save any text as an ad. Now you have a tag that you can paste anywhere in any post to show the javascript or you can add to each post, if needed.

A lot of blogging tools like Live Writer will add images or other objects and style them for you, but sometimes it’s easier to open a browser window and write a post. I use Darkroom, Windows Live Writer, ScribeFire and the WordPress posting page. It just depends on the post and my mood. And these are a couple of the simpler tricks I picked up for doing things the old school way.

OneClick Framework | Daily Usability

I am going to have to add this one. I have about ten plugins that need updating. Unfortunately, to do it through one-click, I still have to find the plugin in one-click’s list, delete it, and then add the new. I guess with this one, you won’t have to go through all those steps. We will see.

Burning Questions • The FeedSmith Plugin: newly fortified as part of this delicious breakfast

And you should probably get it pretty soon, since it’s a security release.

Some WordPress plugins that permit the entry of user-entered values, such as older versions of FeedSmith, can be vulnerable to what is called a "cross-site request forgery." Without getting overly technical, this permits someone to change WordPress plugin settings on your system without you noticing during the time you are signed into your WordPress control panel. And no one wants that.

This is going to be a quick post of thing I will be doing this weekend, if possible.

I am going to be moving this blog over the weekend. I will still try to post during the process. And I may take advantage of the Drupal WordPress Module. I wind then run this blog on the front page of a Drupal installation and work on Drupal in the background over the next few months. There will be so much more I can do with the two together.

I am still looking for some WordPress plugins or if I get to it, I will write them. Something that saves links to a single post with a button like the press it button, so I can save top links over the week and then do a link list once a week or so, with integrated trackbacks. Some way to join the alinks plugin with the link cloaking plugin after which I will be thinking about a desktop link uploader to connect to the xml-rpc functions of alinks. And a plugin or them adaption that will allow me to customize sidebars to specific pages.

I will also be screwing around with my other active blog and its theme.

Here are few interesting links I found outside the realm of the blogs I normally follow by going through the top 25 design blogs list:

Found out about the WordPress Revolution Theme which I almost purchased, but will wait. New themes can come when sites are ready to use them on.

Found out about another John Chow Treatment. But the circumstances were different. David Airey suggests the following steps to avoid a Google penalty:

• Don’t participate in any form of black hat SEO
• Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to any paid links on your website
• Be careful not to link to bad neighbourhoods

But I don’t have paid links. Any black hat SEO would have only have been by accident, if that’s possible. I may have linked to a bad neighborhood, but am not sure how to find this out and probably don’t have the time.

I found some seo tips for PDF files for those of you wanting to release an free ebook and squeeze all the possible hits out of doing so.

Cre8buzz will be lauching over the weekend also, if I am correct. I moved up to number 1 in my group and 105 overall. Pretty simple to do and everyone sems very friendly.

Well, that’s about all for now. Back to moving.

I have been looking for a WordPress plugin that will make the reading of tutorials that span more than one post easier. By default, WordPress will sort posts by the date, descending. I need something that will sort the post for a certain category the other way. That way if I create a category whose subcategories are all tutorials, archives for each of the subcategories will have the tutorials in the correct order.

I have found posts at forums of people looking for the same type of plugin, but I have yet to find the plugin. But the plugins I did find were interesting and I spent some time browsing through them.

Feed Footer WordPress Plugin – How To Grow Your Blog Traffic
Stop waiting for getting approved for feed ads and do it yourself. This plugin will rotate up to 10 ads under the blog posts in your rss feed and allow you to add copyright notices. You can use any type of HTML code and any length. I found 2 or 3 similar plugins, but they did not have as many features.

mutube » Blog Archive » AdSense Manager v2.0 (Beta) Released
John Chow recommends Adsense Deluxe and unfortunately the day I read his ebook, the site where the plugin was hosted was down and it was down the next. So I found this and works out pretty well for me. You can set up ad codes and then ad them to any post you want to. The plugin is set up to create the adsense code for you or you can save the code from any other ad program into the system, if you don’t deal with Adsense.

WordPress-phpMyAdmin : silpstream
Deal with your database from within WordPress instead of having to login separately through phpMyAdmin.

And after browsing through the WordPress Plugins Database, I found something that will do what I want it to do for the time being. It’s the Articles plugin from Alex King who also wrote Popularity Contest.

And then I found another one: Organize Series WordPress Plugin « Unfolding Neurons. This one will allow you to add a custom category which will list posts you choose to be included in a series.

I guess it just takes time. Enough browsing for today. Back to work.

6 Spanking New WordPress Plugins You Haven’t Seen

Great list of plugins, including one I have been waiting for for a long time. I have always wanted to install a WordPress plugin from a url. And now I can.