Blackbird Pie is the newest Twitter tool to be released. The tool (or toy, depending on how you look at it) is simple enough to use. To test it out, I found a witty tweet by my tweep Alex Friedman, a quirky online marketer and comedian here in Denver who tweets a lot about the giant tin ball she is building in her office. Normally, if I wanted to embed a tweet in a blog post I would take a screen shot like the one below and save it to my desktop, then upload it to the media library in Wordpress and insert it into my blog post (which is exactly what I did to embed the tweet below into this post.) The process takes somewhere around five minutes, depending on how much coffee I’ve had.

To test Blackbird Pie, I copied the URL of Alex’s tweet and then pasted it into Blackbird Pie’s form field. After clicking the “Bake It” button, I was presented with a block of html code and a preview of what Alex’s tweet would look like once I baked it into my blog. The preview looked really promising, so I got pretty excited.

But I shouldn’t have. When I pasted the code into the html editor of this blog, which runs on Wordpress and Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme, this is what I got:

Yeah … it wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, but it did include links back to the actual tweet as well as Alex’s full Twitter stream.  To be fair, the developer puts several warnings on her site that Blackbird Pie is an experiment in beta testing. @RobinSloan of Twitter Media even goes as far to see that you are welcome to use Blackbird Pie, “but only at your own risk” LOL. To be even more fair, I should admit that I have 0nly tested  Blackbird Pie on Wordpress blogs running the Thesis theme and didn’t put much effort into trying to style it. Actually, all I did was copy and paste the Blackbird Pie-generated code into my post. With a little time and effort, I might be able to clean the Tweet’s styling up. But that would be a lot more work than embedding a screenshot into a post.

Blackbird Pie is a great idea, it just isn’t fully baked … yet, that is. I am looking forward to future releases that render prettier versions of the originally tweets across multiple platforms (including Wordpress with the Thesis theme). And I’m definitely going to start following @RobinSloan’s tweets so I can be one of the first to know about the next release.

New Twitter Tool Blackbird Pie Leaves Tweets Half-Baked is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

Because you don’t need a plugin to remove one word of code for you

By default, Wordpress nofollows author comment links. For those of us who would like to reward our commenters with a little link love, there are plenty of plugins available that will remove the nofollow attribute from these links. However, you probably already have a couple of plugins installed that you cannot live out. Add a few more, and you will notice that your blog isn’t running as fast as it used to. This would be bad not only for usability, but due to the fact that page load time is becoming an increasingly important search engine ranking factor. Need more reasons to limit your use of plugins as much as possible? Here’s just two of many: 1) Plugin authors can stop supporting Wordpress upgrades at any time. 2) Plugins sometimes will break a new theme installation.

So don’t use a plugin if you don’t have to. Especially if all you need to do instead is remove one word of code, which is all we need to do to remove the link condoms from our author comment links. The thing is (and brace yourself if you have never done this before), we are going to have to alter one of the core Wordpress files. I understand how this can be a little scary if you have never done it before (and for good reason, because you can break your entire blog by leaving out a simple bracket when you touch the php), but we are only going to remove a single word in this instance so it will be okay. And I’m going to hold your hand.

Wide awake and ready to go for it? Great! Here’s what to do:

1. Via ftp or however you are most comfortable accessing your core files, open up the WP-includes folder and make a backup copy of the file named “comment-template.php”.

2. Locate this bit of code for the “get_comment_author_link” in the working copy of the file:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

3. Delete the word “nofollow” and the preceding space so that you are left with this:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external' class='url'>$author</a>";

4. Save your file.

5. Check the source code of a page with author comment links (or use a tool like SEO Firefox that highlights nofollow links) to ensure your comment links are now sharing link juice.

Voila, that’s it!

Final thoughts

You should note that since you altered a core Wordpress file (version 2.9 in my case), you will need to repeat this process when you upgrade Wordpress. If anyone knows how to do this by altering the custom functions file in Thesis, I would love to know as this would eliminate repeating this process each time I upgrade Wordpress.

How to Make Author Comment Links Do-Follow in Wordpress Without Using a Plugin is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.