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English is fluid and changes are swift. We all just try to keep up.

Our collective financial woes have spawned words like “frugalista” and “furcation”.

If you are a lover of wordplay, you’ll love this.

From Reuters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE52P5IZ20090326

This is a fascinating interview that David Pogue had with Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place, which has an incredible idea for putting electric cars all over the world. Great reading:

Read the Article

I’ve spent an enjoyable Sunday morning, watching my favorite news shows–Meet the Press and This Week with George Sephanopoulos–and thinking of ways to connect Twitter to the rest of my online presence.

There are several things that I have accomplished in this arena: a) I display my latest Twitter posts on my company website; b) I can post to Twitter from a custom web page that can be embedded into a FileMaker database, and c) when I publish a new blog post (this one, for example), it will be tweeted for me, along with a nice shortened URL pointing to this article.

I will hasten to point out that I didn’t write any of these slick interfaces for Twitter; rather, I did some rudimentary web searches and found the tools that I’m using here. Hopefully, this article will help others to do the same with their websites and databases.

On my Longterm Solutions website’s CONTACT page, I have a couple of widgets that my clients find useful; the first is an IM widget that shows my IM status and allows site visitors to IM me from my CONTACT page. I know, this isn’t about Twitter, but I want to share the link anyway…

PUT AN IM WIDGET ON YOUR WEBSITE
This nifty little IM widget allows visitors to IM me from my Contact page; they don’t even have to have an IM account, which is really handy. I’ve gotten several messages from the widget in the short time that it’s been on my site.

To use this widget, you can go to the link below and customize the widget to your liking:

Wimzi.aim.com

DISPLAYING YOUR TWITTER FEED ON YOUR WEBSITE
Getting others to follow your Twitter feed is a basic goal of your Twitter existence, for without any followers, your posts are completely useless. One way to do this is to let non-followers see your current posts so that they can judge for themselves the usefulness of those 140-character snippets that you post.

To show your recent tweets, go to this page (you’ll need to login to your Twitter account) and choose the interface you prefer:

Twitter Badges

Select the type of page into which you’re going to embed the feed, and then copy the code that it generates for you. Very simple!

SENDING A TWEET FROM FILEMAKER
Someone asked about how this was possible from FileMaker, and I dug around and found some code that did just what I wanted. The process can be done two ways, although I have yet to try the 2nd method: the straightforward method is to post the Twitter feed pages (you can download them from the link below) on your web server, and then link to the form page in a web viewer. The second method is to use Scodigo’s SmartPill to run the PHP from within your database itself. If you’re not familiar with SmartPill, run–don’t walk–to download and purchase it. SmartPill allows you to do practically anything that can be done with PHP, from within your database. Incredibly powerful.

To give you an example of what you can do with SmartPill: I have a shareware application called Contract Creator, which is a FileMaker runtime that generates American Federation of Musician contracts for recording sessions (some of you may know that I’m a studio musician, in addition to being a FileMaker consultant); Contract Creator is in use all over the country by musicians, production assistants, and publishing companies for filing contracts.

If someone downloads it and tries it (they can use it without purchasing it, but a message obscures the printed contracts, rendering them unuseable), then they decide they want to buy it, they can click a button in the application, which opens the BUY page on my website. Straightforward stuff so far–but here’s where it gets cool: in the order form, their install code (a code generated when they put the app on their machine) is sent to the form. After their purchase is successful, the page then returns the unlock key to the database, and, using SmartPill, it’s received and pulled into the appropriate field, which then unlocks the application. Pretty slick, eh?

One more little goodie: if they install an update, they can click a button, which queries the database for their unlock key, returns it, and unlocks their copy for them–all without their typing a single character.

So the power of PHP with FIleMaker is virtually unlimited, and not strictly for use in web applications. The blend of the two is where things get really interesting. In my latest project, NowPublisher, I have an upload page on the NowPublisher web application, which users of the solution also get; this same upload page is embedded in the database in a web viewer, so that users can upload either from the NowPublisher database, or from the NowPublisher web app that goes WITH the database.

DOWNLOAD THE TWITTER POST WIDGET
Here’s a link to the simple little Twitter POST app; to use it, simply put the pages on your site, and if you want to use the page that automatically posts to your account, put your username and password into the page called “insertTwitterMsg.php.”

Download the Twitter Post widget

POST TO TWITTER WHEN YOU UPDATE YOUR BLOG
I added a neat little plug-in to my WordPress blog that will tweet whenever I publish a new blog entry (like this one). In your WordPress admin, go to the Plugins section and click on ADD NEW; look for a plugin called Twitter Updater.

Hope these help!

Bob

Proving once again that the best way to reach Americans’ brain is through their funny bone, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show continued his warpath aimed at irresponsible financial reporting by CNBC, specifically calling Jim Cramer out for his comments on how easy it was to profit from misinformation aimed at Apple.

Calling it “disingenuous at best and criminal at worst,” Stewart grilled Cramer, the host of the frantic energetic “Mad Money” entertainment show, for his act of being “doe-eyed innocent” while celebrating the admittedly illegal shenanigans of hedge fund managers.

Read the full article…