With Twitter becoming more and more popular and a key tool for many business models, it’s always nice to be able to see all your replies as soon as possible.  While Twitter does allow an option to get text messages when you get a reply, the truth is, many people don’t have text messaging, while they do have email on their phones.

So here is a way to get your Twitter Replies sent directly to your email, so you can still be a part of the conversation even at event conferences and when you’re on the road.

1. Find Your Twitter Reply Feed

When you look at your Twitter Replies page, you’ll notice there isn’t a link to your RSS feed.  But with a little searching, I found the link.  Actually I hit view page source and copy and pasted the url.

But when you do this, a popup asks you for a username and password. Don’t worry about entering it, you don’t need to do this.

Here’s the url, it’s the same for everyone, so this should work for you:

http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss

2. Put Your Twitter Reply Feed Into Notify.Me

Go to notify.me, make sure you’re signed in (if you don’t have an account, then you need to register), and paste the above url into the url box under the sources tab.

Before hitting “Add Site” you need to modify the Reply Feed url.

Because you replies are password protected, you have to add your username and password to the url. Here’s the format you need to use (make sure you include the colon between the username and password:

http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/replies.css

When your feed has been aquired by notify.me, you’ll see it listed below the url textbox.  Click the Email icon to the right of the Feed title.

You’re All Done

That is all there is to receiving your Twitter replies via email.  This saves my butt so much when an important tweet is sent to me and I’m not anywhere near my computer.

I also plan on using this to keep in the conversation at IzeaFest this year.

There are also other ways to do this using FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes, and others.

What tool do you use to get your Twitter replies via email?

I live in what seems like one of the least technologically savvy places in the world.  Western Kentucky.  While there are many that are technologically savvy, there are just as many, if not more, that probably don’t even own a computer.  And if they do it’s only to send and receive email.

So it’s no surprise that when I tell others I’m a professional blogger, they ask me, “What’s a blog?”  I think I get asked this at least once or twice a day.  But I find myself stumbling for an answer each and every time.

When you start blogging and interacting with the blogging community, you tend to not really worry about the basics, like what blogging even is, so when you’re asked, it may be a little hard to give a good answer.

What is Blogging?

I often go back to the answer that blogging is basically an online journal, except it’s not anymore, it can be whatever you want it to be.  But this only serves to confuse those who ask me that much more.

Some of them actually stop listening and start looking around, trying to get out of the conversation just as quickly as they got into it.

To put it simply, blogging is nothing more than a website where you write articles and they display in a reverse chronological order.  It’s a new form of news media that is controlled by anyone that has something to say, rather than a college educated journalist.

A Little Help From Common Craft

The next time you find yourself stammering for an answer about what blogging really is, send those asking the question to this post.  Tell them to watch this video by the Common Craft Show, then if they have further questions, feel free to make an attempt at answering them.

I see it all the time.  People always talk about how their web browser crashed because they had 30+ tabs open at once.

I don’t have this problem, but that’s only because I hand-coded my own dashboard to handle everything I need to accomplish on the web.  Almost like a “virtual browser” which helps keep me from being tied to one computer.  I work in the cloud baby!

Anyways, on average how many tabs do you have open at once in your browser window?  I’d also love to hear why so many tabs are left open.  Is it things you plan on getting back to?

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Much of the focus put on Wordpress plugins revolves around those that are most popular.  Those that you use just because everyone else is.

While most of the popular plugins are very worth having on your blog, there are some plugins that aren’t talked about as often, but they help give character to your blog and put focus on the all of the small details.

Here is a list of the 7 Wordpress plugins you didn’t know you needed:

1. Exclude Pages From Navigation

This plugin allows you to choose whether each page you create is included in your navigation with the simple click of a checkbox.

Some blog designs allow for only a limited number of page links and if you create more pages than there is a spot for links, you can cause the layout to mess up and look very amateur.

Click here for the Exclude Pages From Navigation plugin.

2. Feed Footer

When we think of monetizing our blogs, we often overlook a big part of the blog.  The RSS Feed.  Focus up until now has always been on how to monetize your blog for those visiting it, but little has ever been done about monetizing your RSS feed, so those that don’t visit your blog can still see your ads.

Feed Footer does just this.  It allows you to include any type of ads you want below each of your posts in your feed.  And it even offers the option to rotate ads, so you aren’t showing the same ones every time.

Click here to get the Feed Footer plugin.

3. iConnect Social Media Bar

The iConnect bar is very important for those of you wanting to offer your readers a way to connect with you on your social media profiles, or any other website or blog you choose.

The iConnect bar is viewable by your readers no matter where they are on your blog.  It is attached at the top of the page and scrolls as the page is scrolled, so it’s alway in view.

Since using this plugin, I’ve had a very large increase in my readers connecting with me on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Click here to get the iConnect Social Media Bar plugin.

4. No Self Pings

By default, Wordpress pings any post you link back to from another post in your blog.  This posts a trackback in the comments section from yourself, and can look very unprofessional, as well as get in the way of legitimate comments and trackbacks from your community.

The No Self Pings plugin stops your deeplinking from causing trackbacks to appear on each of your posts comments sections.

Click here to get the No Self Pings plugin.

5. Parallel Load

When your blog loads javascripts, it loads them one at a time.  That is why your blog loads slower the more javascripts your are running.

To keep your blog from running slower, you can load the javascripts at the same time by using the Parallel Load plugin.

It decreases the load time on your blog, and also includes the option to load javascripts last, which means your visitors can read your post while your javascripts are still loading.

Click here to get the Parallel Load plugin.

6. SEO Super Comments

For each user comment this plugin will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but will be created dynamically using the SEO Super Comments plugin.

What you instantly get in this way is a big jump in your blog’s index visibility to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.

The old author link in the comments will now lead to the newly generated page. The author’s URL will still be displayed (and you can do-follow it now as it will be only one external link on the page).

The concept relies around optimizing the target page using title and H1 tag using the context of the comment. So basically it will take the excerpt of the comment and use it to create the page title and H1 tag and in the body it will hold the content of the comment as well as the commentators previous comments on your blog, causing internal deep-linking as well.

Since now all comments normally drain page rank even when nofollowed (bad for your site) the whole idea of using them to generate links back to your site instead and get free indexable content along the way, looks just much more appealing.

Click here to get the SEO Super Comments plugin.

7. WP-Optimize

For every blog post you write, you are really creating multiple posts saved into your blog’s database tables. And when your post is loaded into your reader’s browser, your blog has to sort through and pull out the correct version of your blog post.

Everytime your blog post is auto-saved, or you go back and edit the post, you are creating a new revision and placing it into your database tables.

In order to get Wordpress to work faster and the page to load faster for your readers, you need to clear all post revision saved in your database and only keep the most current one.

You can do this manually if you know anything about MySQL, but if you don’t, WP-Optimize is a plugin that can make doing it easy on you.

This plugin shows you how many unnessesary post revisions you have in your database as well as those database tables that need to be optimized, and with the click of a couple of checkboxes and one button, will clear it all out for you.

Click here to get the WP-Optimize plugin.

What other plugins do you use that are unique and offer an attention to the small details of a blog?