by Kelli Matthews

How to create your customized Twitter?

Posted on March 23rd, 2009 Deborah Woehr 

When I first started designing Twitter backgrounds, I looked for tutorials that would help me come up with the “standard” sizing that would allow everyone to see my background. My research produced a variety of options for setting up the size of my design, but no standard. The real problem, I found, involved the resolution settings of the users’ screens.

People who owned PCs with 1024 x 768 screen resolutions on 15″ screens couldn’t see what I saw on my 20″ iMac. I wound up using the 1600×1200 pixel size because several of my followers reported that my design got cut off when I used anything larger. Once I uploaded the design, I had to remember to change the background color so the two wouldn’t clash. That was easy on my end, but I still wanted to know what my page looked like on other screens without having to bug my friends into sending me screenshots.

Firefox has this great plugin called Web Developer, which lets you see how your Twitter page will look with different resolutions. I’ve included some screenshots for you to look at.

What a difference, huh? Based on the information I found using Web Developer, your best best is designing your Twitter pages to be compatible with the 1024×768 and the 1280×1024 screen resolutions. As for the image size, I would set it to at least 1600×1200.

 

요즘 제가 관심을 갖는 주제는 minority입니다. 사실 minor와 major자체를 구분짓는 것조차도 이미 사람들을 '보통'이라는 틀 안에 가두는 것이라고 할 수도 있겠지만, minority를 대체할 수 있는 용어가 생각나지 않으므로, 그냥 적어보도록 하겠습니다.

PR에 있어서 광고는 빼놓을 수 없는 분야입니다. 사람들과 커뮤니케이션을 하고 그들을 설득하기 위해서는 광고라는 수단을 적절하게 사용하는 것이 매우 중요합니다.

하나의 광고를 만드는 데 가장 기본이 되는 것은 무엇일까요? 저는 그것이 Target Audience라고 생각합니다. 적절한 Target을 잡고 이에 기반하여 목표를 세운다면, 그것은 이미 절반 이상 성공한 PR캠페인이 될 것이기 때문입니다.

저는 이번 포스팅을 통해, Target에 따라 한 제품의 광고와 그에 따른 플랜이 완전히 달라질 수 있음을 보여드리려고 합니다. 그 예로 유명한 자동차 회사 중 하나인 SUBARU를 들어보겠습니다. 미국은 현재 Cable 채널의 홍수속에 있다고 할 수 있습니다. TV를 켜면, 다양한 관심사에 초점을 맞춘 수많은 채널들이 쉴새없이 돌아갑니다. SUBARU는 그들의 자동차 광고를 다양한 cable채널의 주요 Target에 기반하여, 여러가지 버전으로 제작하였습니다.

우선 지금 보시는 것이 가장 기본적인, 그리고 대중적인 광고입니다.




다음 보시는 광고는, logo라는 gay and lesbian society를 기반으로 하는 cable채널에 방영되는 광고입니다. 
먼저 조금은 가벼운 버전을 보여드리겠습니다.



마지막으로, gay and lesbian society만을 타겟으로 한 조금더 강한(?)버전입니다.

 

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has fundamentally rocked the way that, as consumers, we get information. You may not know the acronym, or know the technology behind it. But, trust me, it has affected your daily consumption of information.

This is not just "online" vs. "offline" - it's "push" vs. "pull."

Let me explain.

Since the dawn of information, we've been beholden to the all-wise, all-knowing gate keepers to tell us what we need to know; whether it's editors, PR people, educators and so on.

This is "push." Read this, listen to that.

With RSS, we now have control over information. We "pull" what we want, when we want and how we want. This has rocked the traditional information providers and opened up a whole new world.

Here, let Common Craft explain it.

Bloglines: For its ups and downs, I seem to keep coming back to Bloglines. Likely, that's partially because that's what I cut my RSS teeth on and what I'm used to. But when I compare it to some of the others on this list, it feels cleaner. What I don't like - if you jump out of the feed you're reading for some reason, that clears the unread posts out.



Flock: Flock is beyond a feedreader, it's a "social browser." You can connect to your blog(s), Twitter, Flickr, video and get your feeds all in one place. I do like the interface and its a Mozilla thing, so it works a lot like Firefox. I just can't quite commit to go all the way with a new browser, so I keep coming back to Bloglines. But this is definitely my second choice.



Netvibes & Pageflakes: Netvibes and Pageflakes are pretty similar. Both are designed to be an "all in one" feedreader and iGoogle-esque home page. I like both. Netvibes imported my feed folders as individual tabs, which is a nice for organizing. The layout of both works nicely. I like the feedreader part better than Google Reader, so these are a nice alternate to iGoogle.



Tips for making feed reading a habit you can manage.

• Make your feed reader your home page - open a browser, greet your feeds. That seems easy enough.
  
• Add browser button as a visual reminder - I have my bloglines button at the top of my Firefox browser, so it's just within my vision to remind me that I need to see what's up. I have to admit that creating the habit didn't take long and now I'm as dependent on Twitter as I am the feed reader.
  
• Set an outlook or other email reminder service to jog your memory once a day - if you're reading any more than a couple of dozen blogs, you need to stay on top of it and check daily. Especially when you're starting out. As you get in the groove, you can find your own rhythm. If I wait more than a couple of days, I have hundreds of posts to catch up on.
  
• Use your reader + a social bookmarking application - if I only have time to scan, I'll scan headlines, open posts that look interesting and tag them in Delicious. Then later, I can hit the highpoints and read the things that really caught my eye.
  

For those veterans of RSS feed readers... any tips for the newbies?

 

by kelli Matthews
http://www.prosintraining.com