Posts tagged family
Quick Guide to Social Media using WordPress
Jul 9th
Top three reason to use your wordpress site as your Social Media Distribution system rather than the competitions.
1. If you have a WordPress site or some other CMS like it then you should take this as a rock, not a grain of salt.
2. If you’re using social media for your company like twitter, Facebook etc… You should listen, it wont take long.
3. If you’re tired of using multiple Social media accounts or paying someone to do so in order to promote a product or event. You can still do this but now all in one place.
Let’s start.
Using WordPress and a few simple but powerful tools can get this all done in a flash.
First and foremost I suggest that you start all of your content from your home (your website) and then tree out to the social media sites. Why give them the all your hits and probably never see them kick back any in return.
Some tools I use for our wordpress sites are. RSS Graffiti, WP to Twitter and Twitter Feed. Are simple to setup and you’ll never need to touch anything except for wordpress for a while. Especially if all your doing is saying things like. How was your weekend, come see this, come on in and check this out etc… And last but not least is Shareaholic an easy to install plugin for WordPress.
All wordpress RSS is handled in a simple way. To find your feed you may need to look at the wordpress feeds page : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds and figure out what format you may be using depending on if you use permalinks or not it could be as simple as just adding /feed/ to the end of a WordPress category URL…. That’s how we roll.
First off find your feed. Example: http://c1n.tv/feed/
Chrome reads feeds fairly standard so if you’re interested in the appearance I suggest FF IE, Safari. On a sidenote: Wow Google have you not even checked or I guess they make you use a reader?
RSS Graffiti: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/ / https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/
A little slow but works beautifully, Simple to register and feed your post category to Facebook. Enough said. Search for RSS Graffiti on Facebook and they walk you through the steps to get a feed setup for a Facebook page you made or at least have admin access too.
WP to Twitter: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
Probably the most time consuming to setup but by far the best one I’ve found for twitter. This one lets you not only send your new posts to twitter but also resend a post to twitter without having to republish one and duplicate content just by clicking update (Just beware if you don’t want things going to twitter if you update a lot.). As well it provides you with a way to push content to a Hash-tag ! Sweet! Login to twitter and select API down there at the bottom and/or visit https://dev.twitter.com/ to get started. The plugin designer also wrote a nice walk-through on how to do this as well. But you’ll need to creat a new Application, call it what you will, put your URL in (Not yoru feed) and make sure you have it set to read and write access level. That should get you all the keys and tokens you need to copy into the WP to twitter settings. Once setup it works great. Believe me.
Twitter Feed: http://twitterfeed.com/
Simple to register and feed to twitter. Can also be used for more than one account and not just for twitter, however I only use it for secondary accounts, for example. You have a category that you want to feed to a separate twitter account, this is made possible by twitter feed. It’s not instant like WP to twitter but like RSS graffiti it sends a category feed to an account you define. Great if you have multiple twitter accounts and directly relate to categories you have made in wordpress, like News, Movies, Music etc… Not as pretty, but then again are tweets pretty? lol. I don’t think they allow that yet.
Shareaholic: http://www.shareaholic.com/
Simple to install plugin for sharing posts, pages etc… I usually use this after I have sent things out to Facebook and twitter. This pretty much encapsulates the rest of places you can socialize your post with in one simple click. The key to sharing using shareaholic I think would be that whatever you are sharing is share with whoever you’re logged in as. To make sure your sharing as the right person just make sure you’re logged in as them or else it will share from your personal account.
Hope these applications give you a little insight into what you should be using for social media rather than spending your time on 3 or 4, why not just press a button and feed the family all in one, on top of that you’ll be sending people to your website rather than keeping them outside and so easily moved to something else in 5 seconds or less. Let’s hope that’s not the case. Feel free to comment, if it’s related I’ll approve it.
Thanks!
Aaron Smith
webmaster@boulderchannel1.com
“Darling Companion” a Shaggy Dog Story
Jun 16th
“Shaggy Dog Story”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Darling Companion is a pleasant little movie about a simple little subject from the beginning to the end.
Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, this movie can be added to his other movies, such as the 1981 Body Heat, the 1983 The Big Chill, and the 1991 Grand Canyon, among many others.
It stars Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, and Sam Shephard, and it is about a lovable dog that goes missing and all the problems that causes.
When the movie opens, Beth and her daughter Grace are returning home from the airport when Beth orders Grace to stop the car on the freeway, because she saw something on the side of the road.
What Beth saw was a dog, and to make a long story short, after a veterinarian says there is nothing wrong with him that a few good meals and a bath won’t fix, Beth decides to keep the dog and names him Freeway.
Beth tells her reluctant husband, Joseph, “He’s not mine. I’m just going to find him a home.”
Well, you can guess how that works out, can’t you?
Sure enough, a year later, everybody is at the vacation home in the mountains of Beth and Joseph, where Grace is getting married, and Freeway is still a part of the family.
So, Joseph is out in the woods taking Freeway for a walk when Freeway spots a deer and runs off after it.
Freeway doesn’t come back, Beth blames Joseph for losing the dog while Joseph was talking on his phone, and this disrupts everybody’s plans for going back to their homes after the wedding, because now they all decide to stay until Freeway can be found.
Everybody includes Beth and Joseph, Joseph’s sister Penny, Penny’s grown son Bryan and her new boyfriend Russell, a young woman who “sees things,” because her mother was a gypsy and her father was a yogi, and even the local sheriff.
Well, now the story isn’t so much a story about a missing dog, but a story about the relationships of three sets of couples, some good and some not so good.
Darling Companion is like a shaggy dog story, which means that you either enjoyed all the details as it gets to the end or else the end itself was just as enjoyable.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Flagler College faculty-led trip to Costa Rica
Jun 5th
The following is an update on the program from Flagler student Adam Krell who is currently on location with fellow classmates Ana Chambers, Diane Cassidy, Matt Garber, Elijah Hayes, Adrienne Gonzalez, and Stephanie Sweeting.
The program is led by Assistant Professor Agnieszka Johnson.
It is not every day you get on a plane to travel to a different country for five weeks. Upon arriving in the beautiful country of Costa Rica, we were greeted by our host families at the airport, who speak no English. From that point on, it has been non-stop Spanish speaking for all of us. It is truly a rewarding experience watching not only myself, but also my friends grow in the language and culture.
Intercultura School of Languages here in Costa Rica strives to provide full Spanish immersion for students so we can fully develop the skills and techniques required for learning a second language. From the intensive Spanish courses and the homestay experience with our Tico (Costa Rican) family, we are building the confidence needed to speak in Spanish.
Each day we wake up early with the sun and eat breakfast with our host families. We converse about what we have planned and make our way to the school. Spanish class starts at 8:30 a.m. sharp each morning and lasts until 12:30 p.m. with two fifteen minute breaks. After taking an hour to walk around and eat lunch, we either have a Costa Rican cooking class or dance class followed by another class taught by our faculty leader, Professor Aggie Johnson. During the cooking classes, we have learned how to cook several local dishes, like Patacones (smashed plantains that are fried, like chips) with guacamole and beans, biscochos (a Costa Rican corn cookie), and empanadas, all while learning our way around the kitchen speaking Spanish. During our Latin dance class, we learn one of three styles of dance: merengue, salsa or bachata. As we move our hips to the beat, we have fun dancing with each other and a variety of other students who also are attending Intercultura.
Our other class, with Professor Johnson, is a Spanish literature course that will eventually end with each of us writing and reading our own short stories. This class is more challenging, as we come to class and discuss a short story completely in Spanish each day. After class, we head home to eat dinner with our host families and talk about our days. It’s non-stop Spanish speaking until we go to bed.
As we are ending our third week here in Heredia, a suburb of the country’s capital of San José, we have experienced many different adventures. From seeing an active volcano, Póas, visiting a waterfall garden, taking a tour of the coffee plantation Doka (a local company near Heredia), to taking weekend trips to San José, we are not missing out on anything that Costa Rica has to offer.
In the next two weeks we are going white-water rafting on Mount Chirripó, the highest peak in Costa Rica, and making our way to Playa Sámara for a week. There, we will spend the week with another homestay family and attend classes right on the beach. When the week ends, we will make our way back to Heredia for one night and fly back to the United States on June 11.
As the Ticos say here in Costa Rica, ¡Pura Vida! (which translates to “pure life”)
Source: Flagler College