How Bloggers Can Help During Times of Tragedy

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On April 25, tragedy struck Nepal as a 7.8-magnitude earthquake destroyed residences and buildings (including the UNESCO Word Heritage sites) in Kathmandu and took the lives of around 5,000 civilians (and counting). The earthquake is the most devastating natural calamity that hit Nepal since the Nepal-Bihar earthquake in 1934.

Relief efforts from all over the world are underway but frustration is boiling in some parts of Nepal who have yet to receive the assistance they badly need.

If you wish to help your Nepali brothers and sisters, below are links to online media outlets pointing to trustworthy organizations collecting donation or the victims of the earthquake:

Before sending out your donation, read this post at NPR first to understand how your donation is received and processed by these organizations.

While these are the steps that you can take in order to lend a helping hand to those in need, the question now remain: what I can do to help as a blogger?

If you are an authoritative blogger with a sizable readership and clout to influence your audience, you can use these to make an effort and increase the assistance to the victims of the earthquakes. Here’s what you can do:

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4 IFTTT Recipes to Boost Blogging Productivity

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blogging lessons

As a blogger, you want to make the most of your time producing the best possible content for your blog. This means increasing your productivity and getting rid of roadblocks along the way that prevent you from doing your job.

Enter IFTTT.

This web-based service lets you create conditional statements referred to as “recipes” using third-party apps. Using recipes help you cut time in doing certain tasks online. For example, there is a recipe that lets you automatically save all your Instagram photos to your Dropbox. This way, you don’t have spend time manually transfering the images to your Dropbox. Using this trigger, IFTTT will do it for you.

Aside from using these indispensable time-saving recipes, there are specific conditional statements that will help you how to blog the right way. Below are four of them.

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Why SEO Pros Should Be on Reddit

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There is no discussion necessary when it comes to the entertaining merits of Reddit. The front page of the Internet has a lot of subpages, to be sure, and depending on which page/s you frequent, you will have various experiences. The bottom line is that you can find yourself browsing and reading Reddit for hours on end without realizing it. The epitome of a timesink.

Reddit

But, aside from the entertaining value of the site, there are actually a lot of benefits to spending time on Reddit, especially for SEO professionals. It is no secret that search engine optimization, or SEO, has received a lot of flak over the years. While there are legit practices, there are some rotten apples (whether it’s an SEO company or individual) that have tainted the scene.

That is no reason to totally ignore SEO, though. The niche still has its merits and there are SEO pros who are actually good at what they do without having to resort to shady practices. If you’re one of these SEO pros, where do you go to interact with likeminded people? More so, where do you go to exchange ideas with people who are not shady at all?

Believe it or not, the answer is Reddit. [Read more…]

Gnip Adding Instagram, Reddit, Bitly And Panaramio To Its Data Pipeline

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GnipGnip has added Instagram, Reddit, Bitly And Panaramio to its firehose of data licenses. The company was previously collecting data from  Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress and Disqus. Data collected by the company was then sold to brands so they could better understand how their products are being discussed on social media.

Gnip will now use public posts from its new services along with their APIs to fold further data into its subscription based reports.

In a blog post Gnip notes:

“Our customers care about every public conversation that happens online.”

Using the new platform marketers will be able to monitor Instagram posts by keyword or by geolocation. With Bitly and Reddit brands will be able to track links that are being shared about their products.  [Read more…]

RedditRewind Aims To Pull Up Old Memories From Weeks Past

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Reddit Rewind

RedditRewind is yet another reason for site visitors to spend their time endlessly clicking through Reddit posts. Developed by platform creator and back-end developer Parham Negahdar and front-end developer Morley Zhi, the RedditRewind feature allows users to use Reddit as a virtual time machine. Redditors can find old photos, videos, and links that have been posted to popular subReddits over the last few months.

Speaking about the need for such a platform Negahdar explains:

“I saw there was lots of interest in such a thing so I launched my existing project as quickly as I could. At the time it was purely a utility. The UI was simply a list of links with dates, months, and years to visit a cache, and the result was simple list of links on the page (think 4chan-level UI). I knew the design sucked and made an edit to my post asking if anyone would be willing to design the site.”

Negahdar not only created the platform, his front-end developer made it look so nice that they actually use it instead of the Reddit Enhancement Suite and the actual Reddit website.  [Read more…]