Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve completed a pretty major overhaul of the site last week. Launched late Thursday, this is the first major refresh of this blog in nearly three years and I am very, very excited to share it with everyone. In addition to a new design of the site, I have completely revamped the underlying WordPress theme in an effort to make the blog more readable, archives more browsable, and content more shareable.
One of the challenges that I faced was how to deal with the archive of over 300 blog posts written since 2006. I spent a considerable amount of time reorganizing the category structure, reviewing tags, and creating a better archive page all in an effort to make the past content more accessible. All posts now have intergrated Twitter, Facebook, and Digg buttons to make sharing the content here easy.
If you do enjoy the content here, I hope you will consider subscribing to the RSS feed, following me on Twitter (@noturnonred), or Liking us on the new Facebook page (where our content is also syndicated).
As we enter the wind down of the Back to School season and prepare for the ramp up into the madness that is Q4 retail, I have exciting content and thoughts to share that I hope will get all of us through the busy season. Expect to also see some fresh content shared from ecommr and a new release of my Retail Twitter Aggregator, which shows a real time, one page view of what retailers are Tweeting.
Thanks for reading No Turn On Red!
This week, Twitter has announced a new feature: the official Tweet Button. This feature will allow publishers to add an official button to share their content via Twitter. Mashable has more information on the button and what this means for publishers and site owners.
I really like this idea and hope that this leads to more analytics from Twitter, similar to the Facebook Insights program.
I’ve started adding this new button to a few sites that I maintain and thought I’d share the (very simple) code for adding this to a WordPress blog template so that it appears on every post.
On this blog, I’m displaying the Twitter Button with a horizontal count. The link is a direct link to the blog post and with the title of the post serving as the Twitter content. In order to populate that, I’ve inserted the following code into the WordPress loop in my template:
<?php $twitVia = "noturnonred"; ?>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-count="horizontal" data-via="<?php echo $twitVia; ?>">
Tweet
</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
If you want to put this on your blog, just change the first variable from noturnonred to your own Twitter account name. After that, the permalink and page title will be properly inserted into the link and your button should appear on your blog posts.
For more information on the options available or to generate a different Tweet Button, visit the Tweet Button page on Twitter.
Really recommend this blog post written by Jim Barraud: Email Newsletter Makeover. He takes a real email newsletter he’s received and shows the technical issues with it that prevent most people from getting all of the content and then shows how easy it is to make it more accessible. Very good use of a real world example and some very simple tips that all retailers should be aware of, especially as the use of email newsletter blasts ramps up as we progress through the holiday season.
For full disclosure, Jim is an associate of mine at Media-Hive.
