Let's Connect! - MUDDLING Across Platforms

[taylorcate]

Email @taylorcate and @RJP43 at [email protected]!

Dear MUDDLErs,

Becca and I wanted to write up a little something to encourage connections in the MUDDLE community across various social media platforms. After scanning our most recent posts and neighbors' posts, we came up with the following hashtags to increase traffic in the backyard:

#muddlewithme
#muddlemag
#muddleOn
#muddlesandbox
#shareyourprocess
#artinprogress
#neighBBoard
#nuttyNeighbor

To tag the Mag, use @muddle_mag and to tag BitByteBit use @publishing_bitbytebit

Please feel free to add any hashtags you think apply to your work and share any accounts, lists, or topics you think we should be following! Wishing you all the best.

-Tay

@RJP43 @gmoe @backpacker396 @gkthiruvathukal @nadinejl @jksily @dislocate @JonHolt @jswatscheno @snblickhan @tymonaghan

[RJP43]

@taylorcate @gmoe @gkthiruvathukal @nadinejl @jksily @dislocate @JonHolt @jswatscheno @snblickhan @tymonaghan @backpacker396

QUICK LINKS to GitHub Repo

1. http://bit.ly/muddle_mag -- gets you to the main repo.
2. http://bit.ly/create_connect -- 🌐 gets you to this issue ("Let's Connect" Let's Connect! - MUDDLING Across Platforms #22).
3. http://bit.ly/WhyMuddle -- 📜 gets you into the wiki ("Why Muddle"- a poetic plea).
4. http://bit.ly/muddlers -- 🍴 gets you to a list of the muddle_mag forks.

QUICK LINKS to Social Media

1. http://bit.ly/tweet_muddle 🐤
2. http://bit.ly/insta_muddle 📷

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All of the above links are Bitlinks; therefore, when sharing them it is important to retain the capitalization, spacing, etc. in order for users to be redirected to the correct site. Here is some additional information with regards to Bitlinks scooped from Tech for Luddites - "Bitly: What Is It and How Do You Use It?"

Using Bitly

First a little terminology lesson. “Bitly” is the name of the company. They call their shortened links “bitlinks” and the first part of the shortened link is “bit.ly”.

Creating Bitlinks

Creating a bitlink is very simple. Just go to https://bitly.com and enter the full URL in the box at the top right of the screen.
Click “Shorten” and you’ll be taken to a page with your new shorter URL.
That’s it! Now just click the Copy button and then go to wherever you want to use it and paste it in.

About Twitter and Bitlinks

Although one of the original big uses of bitlinks was to reduce the number of characters in a tweet, a change Twitter made some time ago actually eliminates that benefit. That’s because even though you might still see the bitlink in the tweet, behind the scenes Twitter converts all links using its own shortening service (t.co) and will count all links as 22 characters (23 if they use “https”).

A Few More Notes about Bitlinks

• In most places that auto-convert URLs to live links (e.g. Facebook), you don’t need to add the “http://” before “bit.ly” when using a bitlink as they will recognize that as a URL.

• Once a bitlink has been created for a URL, if another person shortens the same one later, they will get the same bitlink for it.

• If you sign up for an account with bitly, you can track the bitlinks you create to see how often they’re shared and clicked on as well as some demographic information about the people doing the sharing and clicking. You can also create bitlinks with custom URLs that are easier to remember than the random letters and numbers created by Bitly, as long as someone else hasn’t already used it.

• Twitter isn’t the only place you can take advantage of bitlinks. They’re also useful when you have really long URLs that you’re pasting in an email so they don’t break over multiple lines and therefore become unclickable by the recipient. They’re also helpful to use in images or print documents where you can’t create a direct link to the web page and you don’t have space to write out the whole URL.

• If you see a bitlink and aren’t sure if it’s safe to click on, you can preview the destination page by adding a plus sign to the end of the shortened URL.

[RJP43]

A new way MUDDLErs can notify @taylorcate and I both at the same time is to use the @publishing-bitbytebit/founding-members handle. We will be exploring the creation of team handles as we enter the upcoming stages of creato|neighbo|pee{r review and design feedback.