There are rumors that Facebook has been working on their own Wordpress plugin for Facebook. This is troubling for those of us developers that are developing for Facebook Connect, as it shows that Facebook could in one sweep, wipe any developer writing for the Facebook Connect platform out without any advanced notice. It only appeared that in the past, this type of thing only happened on the Facebook website itself, as Facebook has a right to, but I’ve seen it myself with my own development on Facebook Connect today.

Fair enough. I like competition, although I’d love this to be a community effort. So, since we know Facebook is working on their own Wordpress plugin for Facebook, and we know Facebook isn’t willing to divulge their code yet. Since I’ve already devoted 20 or so of my own hours to the exact same project with no knowledge from Facebook, and am just now learning that Facebook was working on this behind the scenes incognito with no involvement from the community, I’d like to release my own plugin to the public, under the GPL v2.0 today, in the hopes the public can help with development and further building of this plugin, as a community, not just under Facebook’s roof.

It’s very troubling to see Facebook develop on external apps outside of Facebook like this - it only shows that Facebook is not afraid to encroach on other developers’ projects and that any one of us is at risk of having a useful project, our time and effort (I had no intentions on making money from this), wiped out in an instant. Sure, Facebook has every right to compete, but the least courtesy of notifying developers it already knows would be competition. With such a Wordpress plugin this also encroaches on Six Apart’s announced integration with Facebook Connect, and puts Facebook in direct competition with Six Apart instead of making it Automattic’s problem.

It’s my sincere hope that Facebook decides not to continue such projects internally, but instead contributes to existing projects if they must do so. Facebook should in no way be competing with the developers that use their platform without warning, or risk us not being willing to contribute such things in the future. Let’s work together on this Facebook - how about a “we need help” board, or an “internal projects” board so we can know what you’re working on in advance. In this way we can work with you instead of parallel to you and hours spent doing so won’t be wasted. Or how about a little nudge to people like Six Apart saying, “we may just have to compete with you on this in the future” so their own time isn’t wasted with the integration.

Why should I keep building external web apps that integrate and send users to Facebook if Facebook is just going to replace my web apps in the end anyway?

So, I’m going to release my code here right now in hopes we can make this a community project - it requires you to set up your own app for your blog under the Facebook Developers site (just set your callback URL to your own website’s URL), and you must take your application key and enter it into the admin section. Only developers of the Facebook app itself can login through Facebook Connect until Facebook launches (one more advantage Facebook has over us developers - they know when they are launching, and therefore know how much time they have to develop these things, another reason to leave it to us developers in order to keep it fair). To install on your blog after doing so, just unzip the folder in your plugins folder, and activate your plugin under the plugins section in Wordpress. After that, any Facebook user will be able to leave comments, under their own authentication, Facebook avatar, and name without having to re-enter it each time. We’ll be integrating this more in the future - if you can help please let me know! My project is a community project, not owned by Facebook, completely owned by me and you for the benefit of the community.

You can download it here.

You can see it in action on my test site, http://socialmediacast.staynalive.com - check out the Hello World post to see the existing comments. Note you will not be able to log in to Facebook Connect on that site because you are not a developer on the app for that site.

Now, I know I ranted a bit - it’s late, but I hope this makes some sort of sense. Am I out of line here? Should I just scrap my code completely and let Facebook do this? Is it a wise move for Facebook to keep making external apps like this that integrate with Facebook? What’s the best way for Facebook to approach this? I welcome your comments below.

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Well after a week or so of talks and rumors going back and forth Jason Kidd is officially a Dallas Maverick. Don’t believe it? Well Mavericks owner Mark Cuban confirmed it telling ESPN “It’s done, J-Kidd is a Mav.”

The trade, which sends Kidd back to the team that drafted him, consisted of the following details: the New Jersey Nets send Kidd, forward Malik Allen and shooting guard Antoine Wright to Dallas for Devin Harris, center DeSagana Diop, shooting guard Trenton Hassell, guard Maurice Ager, Keith Van Horn via a sign and trade, NBA Draft first round picks in 2008 and 2010 and $3 million in cash. Got all of that? Honestly I am tried of hearing and talking about this trade so I am not going to go into anymore detail.

The Mavericks have scheduled a news conference for this afternoon to make the official announcement.

You probably realize that creating focused pages at Squidoo and Hub Pages is a good way to add to your keyword neighborhood. But, like me, you may not have thought through the importance of tagging your pages to get the most impact.

In social networking sites tags identify your pages with other pages sharing similar themes. For instance, if your Hub Page, Squidoo Lense or Youtube video is about “muscle building” or “golden retrievers”, tagging it with a broad range of related tags will get your hub, lense or video featured in the list of “related” pages that almost always accompanies a viewing of a page sharing your tags.

It is not always clear in these sites how the “related” items are chosen, but you can be sure that it has a lot to do with tags. So tag your items with as long a list of tags as you can get away with - for Hub Pages you might use as many as 40 different tags.

A Simple Tagging Strategy

Don’t deliberately use unrelated tags just because they will get traffic. Instead, find pages in your niche that are already getting a lot of traffic, and then use the same tags as they do. This will immediately give your items a chance to come up when people view those high traffic pages.

For a more complete description of this tagging strategy see

The $5 Traffic Trick

Here’s a great tool for doing keyword analysis. Punch in a keyword and Keyword Buzz returns a list of closely-related keywords along with their search popularity, and Adwords details.

Keyword Buzz offers the easiest and fastest way to compile a HUGE database of keywords for all of your internet marketing efforts.

You can also analyze the amount of competition in any niche market and even uncover hidden and profitable markets within just a few minutes.

Get your free copy of Keyword Buzz.

Focusing on web design in Miami, New York, and other major-metro areas in the United States - TurboNacho stands out as an industry leader with their level of creativity, work ethics, and professional development of award-worthy website designs. Along with very competitive pricing for all of their services, no other Miami Web Design company can match the quality of work offered by the TurboNacho.com design team. This firm can help your company’s site ‘wow’ your visitors with advanced 3d animation, flash intros, and graphically-enhanced templates. While the majority of the Internet consists of dull designs and ’scattered’ content, let this agency help you put together a luxurious design at a fraction of the cost compared to some other New York website design companies. In under 24 hours, you can get your free estimate for your professional website makeover!

Tags: website design, web design, webdesign , website development, web designers, web development, web design company, web designers, web developers, turbo nacho, turbonacho, ecommerce, e-commerce, Custom Solution, Custom Solutions, domain, buy domain, find domain, domain search, 2D Animation, 3D Animation, miami website design, graphic design, creative design, design studio, web marketing, Website Makeover

I’m sure that I’m not the only freelance web developer who has stayed up all hours of the night to meet a project deadline. After pulling the last of a string of all nighters you may be eager to close the books on a project for good. If you choose to do this, do it knowing that no matter how happy your client might be with your custom design, they’d be twice as happy if they knew that your design also meets the needs of their target audience.

We aren’t doing ourselves justice if we just package a project and hand it off on launch day. I can guarantee you that your clients will be much more appreciative if you take the time to confirm that your design includes an intuitive navigation and well organized content that allows visitors to easily find what they’re looking for. For some this may seem unrealistic, finalizing a design concept is usually hard enough. However, going the extra mile and testing for usability isn’t as time consuming or difficult as you might imagine.

This is where Robot Replay comes in. It’s usability testing for the rest of us. Robot Replay allows you to record videos of visitors using your website. It’s extremely simple. Place a single line of JavaScript code into your website and Robot Replay records visitors browsing sessions, and stores the video for playback. You can see where users navigate to, where they got lost and when they leave the website.

At Blogging Squared we use Robot Replay to understand how visitors are interacting with our clients websites. It allows us to identify images that are often clicked on, giving us the opportunity to make static images hyperlinks. It’s also helps us to re-organize any navigational elements that visitors are having problems with and promote popular content to the front of the website.

Robot Reply is a great tool for usability testing on a budget. Take advantage of its offerings and use it to improve the value proposition you offer clients.

Don’t be overly specific when you think about your ideal partner — such as wanting “tall blondes” or “no bald guys.” Celebrate individuality and be open to new possibilities.

You could end up ruling out the woman or man of your dreams simply because they have the wrong hair color or are a few hairs short. Remember, it’s a wish list, and nobody’s perfect. Over the coming months, it will change and grow as you discover what’s really important to you in a relationship. Remain flexible and open with your “ideals.”

If your articles suck so much that no one on StumbleUpon wants to thumbs up them you’re just not getting any traffic from StumbleUpon, then you might want to try this little method of getting free thumbs up, reviews, and traffic (hence the title) for your articles. Now I’m not guaranteeing anything (read: no suing is allowed), but this might work for you.

ONTO THE FREE STUMBLEUPON GOODNESS
There are currently three sites in the Google results for this search (This is the secret, btw). Each of these sites offers you three free automated stumbles a day with whatever review you want - a pretty nice sum. All you need to do is spend a few minutes filling in the reviews and a captcha and VOILA! Stumbles for free!

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Reader’s Question:

I live in Houston Texas. A car insurance agent called us up and ask if there is any young licensed drivers in the household. I gave my sister’s name and the car insurance agent said that she will be excluded. What happens if my sister borrows my car, will she still be covered?

Jennifer

Houston, TX

Insurance providers requires you to list all licensed household members so they may be able to determine their risk for having these licensed household drivers covered by your auto insurance. When you buy car insurance policy there can be risk to insurance carrier covering all household members that is why many insurance provider requires you to add or exclude a licensed household member. The main reason for all this is because as a household member, you may have access to the vehicle and may drive it anytime.

If your sister resides with you in Houston, Texas then your insurance carrier would want to know. You may have in your car insurance policy contract that you must notify them of licensed drivers residing in your household, so that they can add that person as an additional driver to your car insurance policy and be rated accordingly. If you exclude your sister to your car insurance policy she will not be covered by your car insurance policy if she drives your car and gets into an accident.

Tags: auto insurance, teen insurance, Young driver car insurance

On Tuesday night I got pulled over while heading home from work. I was given three warnings; I didn’t have a Texas license, I didn’t have Texas plates and my head was “out”, aka, the cop was fishing for excuses to pull a hotrod over at 11pm on a dark street.

I’ve had an awesome record with the cops these past three years. I went from 5 speeding tickets, one arrest (for speeding) and a pulled license back when I was 17-18 to having not one incident in three years. Since I really, really like having the cops leave me alone now, I decided to begin taking care of my warnings the following Wednesday morning. I took a trip to Cedar Park, a good 30 minutes away, to a DMW where I planned to get my license. Since the license only requires a vision test, i assumed it would be a quick in-and-out procedure. Well, I learned the hard way that the DMW won’t give you the time of day unless you have a Texas registered vehicle so I went back to Round Rock to get a safety inspection.

FAILED

Totally failed the safety inspection. Apparently, they don’t appreciate a disabled power steering system (either, you have one and it’s functional, or you tear the damn thing out completely), or my custom exhaust (pipes exit underneath the trunk, oops?), or my totally awesome horn that sounds like a dying water buffalo on a good day. The shop where I got the inspection quoted me at least $1,000 to start fixing everything and I sobbed all the way to work because I’m BROKE. After a day or two of total and complete panic about my future transportation situation, I took the Mustang to a friend of mine at Texas Custom Auto for his advice. He said we can start with a new power steering pump, a new return line and a belt for $250, the exhaust can have extensions welded onto it and the horn just needs some new under-the-hood dohickies from Auto Zone. All for under $350. Far cry from $1,000, yeah?

Before I got this fantastic quote, though, I was seriously considering picking up a Ford Focus SVT or a 2005 Mustang. The great thing about the SVTs is that they have the most horse power out of all the other models of Focuses. An LX or SE Focus is about 110hp, a ZX3 is 130hp, a 2.3L ST is 151hp and an 2 door hatchback 2.0L SVT is 170hp. An SVT is also the only model that comes equipped with a 6-speed GETRAG manual transmission, opposed to the 4-speed automatic and the 5-speed manual of other models. An SVT, to my knowledge, does not come with an automatic option. SVT are hard to find though. They were only made in 2002, ‘03 and ‘04 and everyone wants one since they can cost less then $12,000 used. Ford can also use the SVT on other models, not just the Focus. SVT stands for “Special Vehicle Team” and is used on Mustangs, too. (2003 Cobra SVT, anyone? yummy..)

Even though I don’t immediately need one of these car yet, I’m still looking to buy one within the year. I’ve always liked the new Mustang style and the more I read on the Focus SVT, the more I’m beginning to like it, too. It’s like a super charged Geo Metro, but SO. MUCH. COOLER!

Wikipedia on the Focus SVT