Ever wondered who follows you out of the people you are following? Here’s something that will tell you.

Just got to lessfriends.com and enter your Twitter details.

You’ll get a long list of all the people you follow, the people that follow you and the ones who fall into both categories.

OK – we know this is just linkbait for the company that wrote it.  They do accounting and project management services, and web design.

But more power to them.

Have you heard of Yammer? It’s a kind of Twitter for companies.

It benefits companies where due to the size of the organisation, employees feel as if decisions and discussions are taking place without them. Implement Yammer and everyone gets to be involved.

In-house experts are able to join in and add value when something relevant to them is yammered. A real tool for improving internal communications.

Unlike Twitter though, Yammer is not entirely free.  You can use it for free, but the paid version has more options.  But it only costs $1 per person per month. Large companies can ask for special pricing.

Watch the product tour – it should get you excited if you are a decision maker in your organisation.

Now you can also use (if you’re brave enough) social media support tool, Get Satisfaction.

Users of your products or services cans report problems, ask questions or share ideas.

The Get Saisfaction service certainly provides a very current interface for you and your customers.

True all your customer service failures will be aired, alongside all the successes. But publicity of all kinds is good publicity – right?

But true sceptics will not even take that step.

Maybe this’ll help: Here’s a blog post that lists 50 Ways to Use Twitter in Business.

Wanna Get That Understated Inner City Look and Feel?

Wannabe no more – you too can add these images to your site. (For any urbanites reading this – I am just jealous of you living in the bustling city whilst I am stuck here in a field. A comorant ate my pondfish today.)

Instead of the usual site home page snapshot that I normally include in each post, today I have created my own, nugatory, (nevertheless cool) image. You do it by visiting typoGenerator, and specifying a keyword or phrase of your choice.

Here are three I generated using the phrase “drop dead gorgeous”

And Three More Using “Marilyn Monroe”

Of course if you choose to type words that have a strong Google appeal – for example Google Images is bound to turn up some photos of Marilyn Monroe if you use the term “Marilyn Monroe”, your generated image will contain recognisable elements.

So visit the typoGenerator Website and type in a phrase. The site uses the words to find images in Google’s Image search – so the images can sometimes  be relevant to the words you choose. Also the characters you type will be used in the image.  They seem to be in many cases, mostly illegible so feel free.

I started with the character string “Drop Dead Gorgeous”, because this is how I am feeling today, but “dragged through a hedge backwards” would work just as well. Give it ago.

Please Note . . .

The site is a little erratic. So to get your generated image, start with the home page. The home page should look like the image above.

If there is a big black rectangle on the home page, it won’t work. You need to start with the home page looking like this image here.

You do this by clicking on the home link.

Here is a site that analyses and lists the fonts and characteristics of some famous web 2.0 logos.

Using this as your starting point (assuming you are as useless at logos as I am), you can almost manage to piece some ideas together to achieve an original logo. Maybe.

Visit The Font Feed for more information.

I have a dedicated server at Rackspace for all my web sites. Rackspace are brilliant but they are expensive, and they only deal in the dedicated server market (at least at the time of writing this was so). With Rackspace I can get superior technical support 24 hours per day, on the phone or via ticketing system. I adore Rackspace. So I’m all right – what about you?

You Want Cheap, Reliable Shared Hosting . . . Don’t You?

Maybe you are just starting out, or if you just want a reliable, fully featured hosting service for your web site. What if you don’t know where to go?  You’ll need somewhere inexpensive, professionally run and well supported by people who will happily answer your questions all day long. I reearched such a host so that I can recommend them to others who want to get started online. The hosting service I recommend is Hostgator. If you are new to the web and want your own domain name and web site, then Hostgator is an excellent choice. Obviously, over time costs vary, but these people are based in the US where hosting costs tend to be cheaper than in the UK. Typically, the Baby package costs around $9.95 per month for hosting. You can buy a domain name at the same time you buy your hosting and that will be around $19.95 per year. There are cheaper places to buy a domain name, but unless you are buying hundreds of them, the ease of setup is worth doing it here in one step.

Already Have a Domain Name?

If you have already bought a domain name you can move it to Hostgator easily.  All you need to do is buy the hosting at Hostgator, and when the site asks you about a domain name you select the option ” I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only”. Next, when Hostgator send you the email containing your account details, you login into the place where you originally bought your domain name and change the names servers there to be the ones that Hostgator include in your new account email.

Don’t Yet Have a Domain Name of Your Own?

If you want to buy hosting AND a domain name, this is even simpler. Just decide on your domain name and buy Hostgator hosting. It will ask you to fill in the domain name you have chosen. IF the domain name you want is available, Hostgator will indicate this and allow you to proceed with the purchase of both the domain and hosting. If not, you’ll have to go back and try a different domain name. One thing though, it does restrict you to .com, .org, .net, .info and .biz domains.  I could not see how to buy a .co.uk domain name.   If you want a .co.uk domain name, then buy it elsewhere and then come back and buy hosting from Hostgator.

Some Reasons I Like Hostgator

• I bought a domain name and hosting for a friend on Hostgator yesterday and it was setup and running within 30 minutes.
• They have great technical support and you can access them 24/7 via the chat window or via a ticketing system. I use the chat window most often.
• Their cPanel is easy to use. So you can set up new email addresses and other technical features for yourself. If you get stuck – they will help you.
• They make website management as easy as it can be for beginners.
• Hostgator is ranked 21st out of 5000 of the fastest growing companies in the US.
• Hostgator is a transparent company – they tell you what is going on, you can read real customer reviews on their web site – nothing is hidden.
• Hostgator is brilliant for hosting WordPress blogs – get a special offer by clicking the Hostgator ad – but don’t forget to use the coupon code stated in the ad when you purchase.
• Fantastico is included so you can install scripts (like WordPress) with a couple of button clicks.

An Example of Hostgator Support

Here is a transcript of a chat session I had with Hostgator support at 6:45am (their local time) this morning. info: Please wait for a HostGator operator to respond. info: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat! You are now chatting with ‘Michael K.’ Michael K.: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat, how may I assist you? Liz: Hi Michael. I need a minute to type my question . . . hang on Liz: I have been having trouble with the contact form on my web site. The emails generated by my contact form are only getting through to my email account IF the person completing the email does not use gmail or hotmail as their return email address. Michael K.: That is strange, what are you using for the contact form? Liz: It seems like Hostgator are preventing me sending emails if they are saying they are from gmail, To see this happen, fill in the form but fill in your email address as a gmail or hotmail email address. If you do I don’t get the contact email in my inbox. If you say your email address is any other domain name (in existence or not), it reaches my inbox. Michael K.: Which mailing script are you using? Liz: I am using codeigniter – a php framework. Michael K.: And is it sending directly to the gmail address? Liz: It is using sendmail Michael K.: But it is set to send to the gmail address right? Liz: Yes – if you complete the contact form using a normal email domain address everything works. Surely it must be the server that is preventing gmail /hotmail addresses from being ‘spoofed’ Michael K.: It is probably on the gmail end, atleast that is my theory. Try creating a forwarder with us, and having that send to gmail. And set the script to send to the forwarder. Liz: I have already set up a forwarder so I could do that easily. Will you wait – or do I have to come back to you? Michael K.: Sure, I can wait. Liz: OK – I have changed the code – I’m sending a contact form now from a person with a gmail account to see if it arrives in the my gmail account. Liz: Oh my God! That worked. Please tellme how you knew that and why it made the difference? Michael K.: Because it was sending out the emails using the hotmail and gmail addresses in the “from” field, but werent coming from the hotmail and gmail ip addresses. Michael K.: Alot of email providers are setup to block that type of mail. Liz: Michael K – thanks very much. Michael K.: No problem. Thank you. Michael K.: Is there anything else I can do to help you? Liz: No – I am happy now. Thanks Bye Michael K.: Excellent, take care and have a great day! Michael K.: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat! If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says “close” in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out. Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

So You Want To Write?

I’ve got two friends who write (as in novels and for money, the printed word), and they both spoke recently about writer’s block. You can read here what Paula has to say on the subject.

I propose a small step towards a solution. Suppose you could listen in on the random thoughts of people all over the world, where those thoughts were likely to be personal, intimate, or revealing. And suppose you did it whenever you needed a creative writing boost? Just a thought – well, you can.

A Take On Twitter

You’ve heard of Twitter (I go on about it often enough), well someone has taken the more personal thoughts (Tweets) expressed by Twiterers, and put them on a rolling web page.

Meet Twistori

When you get to twistori, you just click on the word that appeals to you the most out of :

It is strangely hypnotic, and you realise there are a lot of wonderful people out there.

My initial impressions are that it too suffers from some spammy members, but its layout and operation are an improvement to the MBL offering, so for now, I’ll see how the widget performs in bringing new visitors in.

All of these things require that you spend time using the portals to view other sites, adn you get back what you put in generally. If you want to publicise your blog, you can give it a try.

It does seem slightly odd in that it appears to require you to post your blog entries individually to the site. So what is RSS for?

Pageflakes is an easy way to discover and share the things you like to see online. You can easily create a web start page that keeps track of the many blogs and news sources that you read every day.

You can also add images, videos, a calendar, email, a task-list and other items to further personalise your page. You can even make one-off pages that you can post on the web. This last function may have a social media marketing edge to it – so it is worth checking out.

They also provide the ability to do pagecasts – these are pages you set up with feeds and information on a topic of your choice. I guess this is potentially a great tool for telling people about your business and warming customers up to your products and services. If done correctly.

Here is an example of a pagecast about dogs.