I saw through my Twitter stream someone using Gowalla, and was curious to what it was all about. Gowalla (@gowalla on Twitter) is a site made for people to share where they are in the world. Might sound a bit like telling too much or a way for people to become a bit stalker-ish, but those on the go and use to being social, this is a way to allow people who are interested to know more about you.

You can share if you had a beer or shopped at places like the Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois. Or if you have been to a place that has not been covered, you can create a place, or as they say at Gowalla, ‘pin’ a place.

The site is really user-friendly and allows you the option of connecting your Gowalla account with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The systems is even courteous enough to check through your followers to see if anyone is using the system, so you can friend them at Gowalla too!

Gowalla even has a couple phone apps for users to be able to check-in and automatically update on their profile.

Have you tried Gowalla? What do you think of it?

So Google seems to be seriously looking into reasons why they should stay in or pull out of China. Whether it is the right thing for Google to pull out of China for business reasons as mentioned in TechCrunch, or for the greater good – the fact is that Google can do what they like.

Hacking happens all the time. Ten years ago, we were raving about Yahoo! getting hacked on New Year’s Eve. I remember that because I was online as it was happening and was in shock like the rest of the users on. I have nothing really against China. Their economy is growing and yeah, I wish the United States could be in the same situation, but for any of our home grown companies to venture to another country, it is not my problem to judge Google if they pull out of China.

While some would say that Google is not profiting well in China, and others argue it is stupid to pull out because the country has 1/6 of the world’s population – who cares. If Google pulls out, what can the common techy online do – NOTHING (but grouch about it.)

Perhaps as mentioned in the TechCrunch link above (and I will put a quote from it):

This may be the most shocking part: In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn’t win and owns nearly 40% of the Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Entrepreneur and angel investor in China Bill Bishop —who hasn’t always agreed with my China coverage in the past—pointed this out, adding “Not often Yahoo looks smarter than Google.”

Perhaps Google could learn from this and invest smartly in Chinese web companies as Yahoo! has.

What do you think?

Recently I came up with a dilemma with my own scripts PHPads and PHPurl. Because they have been so popular, and I have been hosting the zip files on my own server, it has been eating up my bandwidth. Believe me this year, the downloads for both have skyrocketed compared to last year. Link promotion from many websites have been awesome, BUT… I have only received $60 in donations last year. I am lucky to have received what I have and appreciative. That is just 3 hours of my time….or even for those who want another smaller comparison – at minimum wage, which covers 1- 8 hour day.

I had to take the files off my server and host them at a free host. I am hosting them at FileHosting.org. I also found a lot of people were going directly to the page and not enjoying the rest of my site, which has a lot of articles that are very useful.

So… in the near future, I am moving it to another page, and putting 125×125 banners on my sidebar. By the way, the site is about to go through a bit of an overhaul. Nothing too extravagant, but something I feel is needed. People who have linked to the scripts in their articles, I will be going through and asking that they either link the Hotscripts listings for each script or my main site.

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I know I am not the only web developer that has had issues. Some have removed their free versions and re-posted to charge a small fee. Some simply removed their script for good. Some could not keep their sites up because of bandwidth from the downloads. Some no longer bother to answer support emails, even if there is a FAQ. The script might be free, but let me ask: If it has helped you quite a bit and you have a few dollars, you might consider pitching in a few dollars. It is not much and it keeps future scripts coming in, and staying free.

It also helps for web developers with smaller websites who might need more bandwidth and space, or even database resources.

Other ways to appreciate your web developer is to either check out their sponsors, or possibly become an advertiser. That way, you still get something for your money. You can also visit other parts of their site. If they blog, perhaps they might be someone you might want to connect with, or find that they have a lot of great information.

Have you shown your appreciation to your favorite web developer lately?

Social Media – it was a word that popped up in the mainstream and blew everyone away by storm. Well, at least those who were not as computer savvy nor marketing savvy.

We learned Social Media and Social Networking were not the same, where social media was a technique to market yourself or your company a social networking were the sites you could exercise your marketing strategies. Of course, there are still people who get those two words mixed up a lot.

This past year, we saw social network giants clamber to be the top, making unique features to draw more users. In fact, there are probably more users that jumped on the bandwagon of social networking versus blogging. In fact, users found more ways to flex their social media muscles on the social networks to attract people to their blogs. Some users found web celebrity status this year, overpowering teeny bopper half clad girls on MySpace who just wanted you to leave a comment while debasing themselves.

We saw governments crack down on Twitter usage, even countries banning their own people from telling the horrible truth about them to the world.

We even saw celebrities and normal everyday people gets sued or even fired or literally roasted online for their Twitter usage.

It has been quite the year for Social Media. Can it get better? Yes. But it could get worse as well. In 2009, spammers crawled out from their holes and found they could play with the social networking masses.

What is in store for 2010? Who knows? For myself, of course, I would love to strive to be better than last year. I went to having a Google PR of 1 to a Google PR 4, and on Alexa, I am doing better than 200K. I actually made my goals, AND beat my goals. I even improved my content. I have more than one blog – each focusing on some of my major interests. I opened Blogrity, a social bookmark site for bloggers that is built with WordPress. I started guest posting at other blogs. I educated and influenced people. I believe I am a blog rockstar, but nothing huge…yet.

What have you noticed this past year in social media, and have you met your goals? How did you go about achieving them and did you use social networking to do it?

I am pleased to know that since the release of both of these scripts, that they have done well in the community since introducing them in January 2009.

PHPurl, my free PHP URL shortening script has been downloaded over 1737 times. Before I reset the demo site, Re-URL.me, the site had been used more than 7000 times to shorten URLs. I even had an issue at one point with banning spammers. I was a bit flattered at first, but also angry to have to find the time to remove them. It ended up the reason for resetting the numbers. PHPurl was introduced at the time where short URL sites have been in need, especially since Twitter has become mainstream. There have been countless sites that have mentioned my short URL script and I appreciate it a lot.

My other PHP script, which is a simple ad management script, PHPads has been downloaded over 3900 times. PHPads is actually a re-troduction and rename of its previous – PixelledADS, which was available well over 3 years ago. Most of the installation questions I have gotten have been the same, and dealing with not CHMODing certain files or changing the ads.dat file before loading it up. As for the page and the demo, because I did not remove the configuration section that allowed people to change the password, I ended up removing the demo, and replacing it with screenshots, until I can find the time to put a demo back up again. Someone had changed the password to be a jerk.

I enjoyed the comments and some of the smaller jobs that people have hired me to customize these for them. As for donations, there have been a few, but it was to be expected. Developers are not as appreciated, but I did not want to turn these into commercial GPL. I may introduce such versions at a later time, but right now, until I have more time on my hands, that will not happen anytime soon.

I appreciate the support and look forward to introducing other projects I have worked on the side this past year.

In the past decade, there has been an increasing number of FTP clients available for free or purchase. For those who do not know was FTP is, it stands for File Transfer Protocol. It allows you to upload and image to another server from your computer. Of course, a lot of the paid FTP programs are great, but the normal person does not really have the money to fork out to buy for a program that they might not use that often. Of course, for webmasters or web designers, it is a necessity, so I have gathered a small list of FTP programs to share.

Here are a few I found:

FileZilla – I use this and it is great!
SmartFTP – actually there is only a 30 day trial, but I have tried it out in the past and liked it. Although it is not free, I thought I would mention it as it has been one that I have enjoyed using.
GoFTP – only costs if you are in a company of 50 or more clients. I tried this, but it did not work very well and I found it a bit unfriendly user-wise.
FireFTP – this is a cross-platform ftp client for Firefox users. I have not tried it, but after asking a few friends of mine, they liked it. It is free and the site says it has been downloaded over 12 million times.
CoffeeCup Free FTP – free version. They also have a purchase version called Direct FTP. Very user-friendly.

What do you use? Is it free? Do you recommend it?

Email Chat Contact Button Sidebar is a plugin designed by the creators of ContactMeButton.com with the purpose of extending more ways your visitors can contact you. The plugin allows your readers to contact you through email, live chat, or even instant messenger services.

In order to use this you have to sign up at ContactMeButton.com and enter your username into your WordPress admin panel so the plugin will work. It is where you will add all of your contact information. You can then drag and drop a widget into your sidebar that will display a contact button.

The issue is that this makes you sign up and there is only a 30 day free trial. After that pricing starts at $5 per month and limits your emails received to 120 per month and 60 chat sessions. They do have a free plan, but it involves placing their ads, which may or may not even relate to your site, which is annoying! And even so, you are limited to email and chat received.

You are better off using open source and FREE services like Crafty Syntax Live Help (not a WordPress plugin, but its own script that you can copy and paste the source into a sidebar text/html widget) that allow you to see when the person is online.

It is a nice idea for a plugin, but there are other ways people can get by this without having to sign up and possibly pay another cent.

Have you heard of this plugin or tried it? What do you think?

WP-FollowFriday for Twitter is a plugin that allows you to select the people you would like to recommend for #FollowFriday. However, when setting this up, I ran into some issues.

It does not ask for a password like in Twitter tools or any authorization. So, how will this connect to the user? I believe more thought and possibly allowing users connect with their Twitter account, and select users would be better. Also, I am the administrator of my blog. Somehow the plugin was telling me I did not have sufficient access to use the plugin.

Also, here is another issue, Follow Friday is not just about listing names. It is about also saying why you recommend a person to be followed. This plugin would allow people who already do not get the concept of #FollowFriday and there would literally be lists of icons, rather than why people should be followed, especially if the list has many.

This also could run into some load time issues with the blog (if the plugin were to work and the people using it list – say 50 people to follow), this would put a little strain on the Twitter API, and frankly as Twitter is known to fail whale or go down lately, or even freeze up, this plugin is not necessarily something I recommend using.

I believe this is a first time I am not recommending a plugin for use, but that is what a review is all about. Unless it is brought back to the drawing board to deal with the user unfriendliness, and altering it to be practical for those who would use the plugin as it should, then I would recommend it. I can give credit to Fabien Bouchard for at least trying to accomplish something like this to make #FollowFriday recommendations unique and easier.

Have you tried this plugin? How has it worked for you?