Tutorial | Joe Hackman

Expand your content sharing with Print Friendly and PDF

October 21, 2011 By Joe Hackman 8 Comments

As bloggers we’re always looking for ways to make our content more friendly, encourage conversation and encouraging distribution of the content to amplify our voice. I recall seeing the Print Friendly plugin for the first time over at Waxing Unlyrical. I thought it was interesting but didn’t connect the dots until yesterday that is.

Why some of your readers will love this plugin

Think for a moment about your less tech savvy readers, the ones who may not even have a Twitter account or won’t bother to click the LinkedIn share because they rarely log in. Or think about the friends and connections of your tech savvy readers that won’t want content delivered anywhere but the old tried and true – Email. This is where the true power of Print Friendly lies. In this video I demonstrate how the plugin works and describe in more detail why I think it is great for the web 1.0/Email crowd.

Video not showing up? Try this direct link.

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Filed Under: Productivity, Technology, Video, Wordpress, YouTube Tagged With: Business, Howto, Joe Hackman, Tips, Tutorial, Video, Wordpress, Youtube

Save travel and searching time with a custom Traffic Map

February 8, 2011 By Joe Hackman 2 Comments

DC Traffic photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

While spot checking traffic on Google Maps today I went to refresh the map I’d created and it disappeared. I then realized that you need to create a link using the Google maps interface in order to be able to refresh the window correctly. It dawned on me that others are encountering a similar issue and might find a simple effective link easier to use. This video demonstrates that and will save you travel and searching time. I’ve found that often here in the Bay Area you can save a lot of time by waiting 15-20 minutes especially coming out of peak times. I also will use the custom traffic map to decide which way to go depending on where the worst traffic is at the time. Hopefully this will also save you time.

More from the idea farm… what else can you do with this?

For starters you can use your URL shortener like mine to create a really simple link that you can reference at any time from any device (where you have not already bookmarked the link) For example I turned this messy link:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.589207,-122.140503&spn=0.582183,1.742706&z=10&layer=t

into this simple link:

http://msol.us/b

Email it to your smart phone
By emailing this link to your smart phone such as my Motorola Droid, you will be prompted to open it using either a browser or Google Maps. By selecting Google maps you will be able to quickly and easily view the map on your phone without fumbling around. You could also create and send a link to a friend or loved one travelling to the airport, etc. I ran into a similar situation several weeks ago when my Podcast guest @dcfemella was running late in DC traffic. I was able to relay a little bit of information to her. Next time I find myself in that situation, I will mail them a link to their smart phone.

Do you have other ideas about how you could re-purpose this Traffic Map link?

Filed Under: Idea Farm, Productivity, Video Tagged With: Google Maps, Howto, Idea Farm, Traffic, Traffic Map, Travel, Tutorial, yourls

Facebook Tips – Tagging best practices and etiquette (Video)

January 10, 2011 By Joe Hackman 44 Comments

I recorded this video to show people how to use the relatively simple tagging function on Facebook. I also explain more in depth in the video some of the etiquette involved with tagging people and pages. This is a great introduction to the feature if you are unsure how to use it or are looking for a starting point on etiquette.

What would you like to see?

Do you have any Facebook related topics that you’d like to see a video of? Please let me know and I will try to include it in this series.

Mentioned in this video/post @Lifehacker and @Shonali

Filed Under: Facebook, Productivity, Video, YouTube Tagged With: Etiquette, Facebook, Howto, Joe Hackman, Tagging, Tutorial

How to delete posts from your amplog on Amplify.com (Video)

December 13, 2010 By Joe Hackman 4 Comments

This video is a direct response to the top two search terms that brought people to my blog this past week. First of all thank you for coming. This video answers two questions that a number of people are asking:

How do you delete posts from MyAmpLog
hide my amplogs on amplify

Here is the video:

Any questions about Amplify (or anything else) feel free to ask in the comment section or on my Youtube Channel

Filed Under: Amplify, Blogging, Technology, Video, YouTube Tagged With: Amplify, amplogs, analysis, Howto, Joe Hackman, MyAmpLog, private, Tips, Tutorial

Howto create your own url shortening service (Video)

December 10, 2010 By Joe Hackman 11 Comments

Earlier this week you might have read my post about why it might be time to create your own URL shortener. Today I am responding to several reader comments and providing a detailed video on how to do it. If you are looking to create your own URL shortening service you may want to watch both of the videos in this post, this video is simply a test drive of the URL shortening service interface. I suggest you watch this one and decide if it is worth the trouble, or if you’re already convinced just skip it and view the second video below.

If the service passed muster and has the features you need, you will want to make sure you meet some pre-requisite items:

Hosting account somewhere that supports MySQL databases and PHP (almost every host does).
Domain name (the shorter the better, in this case I use 0b0.us)
FTP Client (I would recommend Filezilla to Windows users)
Will power to carefully watch the video below and potentially adapt the procedures to your own hosting companies MySQL setup.

Now that you’ve covered the checklist and without further ado, the goods:

I would love to hear if you completed this process yourself, let me know how it worked out. If you still need help feel free to post your questions in the comments below.