Archive for the ‘Cool Tweets’ Category

New Site! TweetCool.com

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

I’m very happy to announce that I’ve launched a new side project site called “Cool Tweets”. It’s currently accessable by way of TweetCool.com however I’m working on securing the more obvious Domain Name.

A Quick Run Down:

Part of my job is staying on top of web trends and technologies. as a result I have my ear to the ground in a lot of places and I’m finding some amazing stuff all over the web on a regular basis.

It got to a point where I was wanting to share it all but would have driven a few of my friends absolutely bonkers had I been sending it to them through I.M. every day. As a result I started looking for a way to share it all but thought a full blown site would be more work than I currently have time for. Also, I wanted to share it the way I would with my friends through I.M. which usually consists of me just copy and pasting the link and sending that to them with no other info. very quick and “click to find out” sort of set up.

The obvious handicap there is I know what my one of my friends would think is cool and want to look at where as I dont have that benifit of being selective with a wider audience. So some information would have to be added.

With the DigitalSkraps Twitter profile being fairly young at that point I had begun posting a few links here and there within that but again, didnt want to over load my followers and have them stop dropping. The volume of stuff I wanted to share had again interupted what I wanted to accomplish.

Keeping with the theme, the same way I run across all this wonderful stuff around the web, the service BrightKit was brought to my attention. Allowing me to manage multiple Twitter profiles. So I gave it a shot. BrightKit is set up to give you the first account for free and then you can add any secondary accounts for a fee, however while in beta, all accounts added are free. Not knowing when beta would end, I quickly started trying to think of every possible Twitter profile I could possibly want in the future just to add it for free now. Upon thinking of all the ideas that could require their own Twitter account it occured to me that Twitter was the perfect place to share all these links, but I simply couldnt do it through DigitalSkraps. So i quickly created CoolTweets and added it to my BrightKit profile.

BrightKit recently launched a bookmarklet called “Hootlet” which allows you to tweet any site your currently on. It automatically shrinks the link and adds it to your tweet inside a pop up. So the ability to share these links got even easier cutting out probably over half the work!

With the process being so easy turning it into a site seemed doable now. Motivated by wanting to increase traffic and followers on Twitter, I did some digging to find the tools I needed to make it happen.

The tools are now in place and the site is around 95% complete. There are a few things here and there that I need to tighten up but I feel pretty confident in letting her fly.

What’s on CoolTweets?

  • Video
  • Artist Portfolios
  • Web Apps
  • Graphic Design
  • Interior Design
  • Green Design
  • Concept Design
  • Inspiration
  • Mac Apps
  • Home Accessories
  • Toys
  • and So Much More!

The Format:

Like described earlier, I wanted to make theses posts similar to just sending the link but I also wanted to help the visitor click on just the links they were thinking seemed cool. Because of Twitters character limit it also had to be condusive to that and easy to scan through so consistency and a pattern where needed.

Because the only qualification for being posted on the site is that I think its cool, regardless of genre or subject, Not everything fits perfectly into one kind of category like the ones listed above. As a result I keep having to come up with new “Categories” and rename some.

The goal however is to have the appearance of things related to eachother organized in groups which are displayed in front of the colon sign.

So if you want to watch every cool video I’ve ever posted you can go to the search bar and enter “Video”, if “Home Accessories” are your thing and you’re super into lamps, give that a search!

Because I do all the posting for this site through Twitter, and not through the website itself, I’m not able to assign actual categories to each post within Wordpress so if you’re a blogger yourself, dont think of Categories the same way when you’re at CoolTweets.com.  It would take me forever to go back and edit every post. Typically theres a new post once an hour, on the hour.

Assistance?

On that topic. I’ve done some searching and had no luck finding this. If anybody out there knows of a plugin that will search the content of a post and file it in a category for me, please let me know. I’d love to have a plugin that looked for “Interior Design:” and then file every post that began with that in a catory named the same. I currently don’t know of a way to automate that.

Hope you all enjoy CoolTweets!

There will be contact information up on the site very soon where you can send me a link to something cool that you would like posted.

Thanks!

Posted in Cool Tweets, Side Project, Site news & updates | No Comments »