Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

When embedding Flash objects such as flickr slideshows in posts on the free WordPress.com blogging platform, you may well run into difficulty. You grab the embed HTML code from the source site, paste the code into your post in WordPress, save your draft then—hang on a minute—where’s the embed code gone? The code gets stripped out.

I was stuck trying to embed this flickr slideshow a few weeks ago so I asked for help on Twitter. Josh R and Warren Pearce pointed me in the right direction, mentioning a workaround using Vodpod to convert the slideshow to video and then posting the video to WordPress.

After some further digging, I found a solution I quite liked within this post by Geeky Coder.

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I stumbled across an interesting application called Twittersheep that produces a word cloud based on the biographies of your followers on Twitter. This is what Twittersheep came up with based on my followers:

There aren’t many surprises in the words that pop out. In a way, I’m quite pleased that my followers’ interests or specialisms match closely to my own.

It’s still interesting though to see what topics your followers use to describe their own interests and how these topics correspond to what you ‘think’ your tweets are about. It’s the content of your tweets that retains followers after all.
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There are many ways to keep up-to-date with new content on the web though this can sometimes seem like an overwhelming task. Where do you start? How do you know if your company or product is being talked about on other websites? How do you find other blog authors talking about the same issues that you’re interested in?

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