For more information and to download, visit the release page.

How Do You Gaboogle?

Everyone nowadays is generally familiar with online commerce channels used by such examples as Amazon.com, eBay, and Apple. These models have been duplicated and at time viewed as being the standard for selling and trading products and services online.

Well after a much needed break from the fall-out of the first “dot-com” bubble pop. I am now project planning for the Gaboogle It? Social Commerce Network. Gaboogle It? is a social commerce network where buyers and sellers will come together and trade almost anything leveraging very unique data mining and sharing between the buyer and seller in a social manner like never seen before.

The Gaboogle It? Social Commerce Network will prove to be an avant-garde solution that is not only valuable for item or service consumption, but it will inspire new socially driven business opportunities for merchants as well.

It embraces the open source community built on WordPress as a FREE stand-alone version as well as a hosted version built on WordPress MU. After many months (almost a year to be exact) of evaluating open source platforms candidates to build Gaboogle It? on, I finally settled on WordPress and WordPress MU due to the WordPress active community, light weight code, easy extendibility, and surprisingly only one commerce application in the space, WP-eCommerce.

Social Networks such as facebook, twitter, and Pownce have set the pace for social networking, and the Gaboogle It? community will be no different and will leverage the available technologies of these applications by integrating Gaboogle It? systems into their communities. Customers of our products or services are friends after all, right?

The Gaboink! network is looking to form an immediate team of contributors in the form of grantors, investors, partnerships, and development resources for this project. If you are interested in being a part of a new ground-level innovation, leave a comment below, use my contact form, or contact me at gaboinked [at] gmail.com. If interested in contributing development resources to a ground level WordPress project, you may also visit the official Gaboogle It? project page located on Google code.

Contributors come in many shapes and sizes and the most important contributor is the one that could potentially use the tool, so I have created a facebook Group and a local focus group discussion in the Gaboink! network forums to allow input from a consumer or merchant point of view. The theme of these focus groups is “How Do You Gaboogle?” trying to discover how you enjoy using the internet today commerce related or not. I encourage you to give a few moments to voice your opinions and take part in a series of surveys or polls valuable to the completion of the Gaboogle It? Functional Feature Specification. How many times are you able to help define a WordPress application before it is built?

Jaiku is a new way to connect with the people you care about by sharing presence updates with them. You can create your own presence stream and follow your friends. It works right from your web browser, and you can also use it on your phone.”

For those of you that may not know the history, Jaiku is a social networking, micro-blogging, and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter founded in February 2006 and launched in July of that same year. Google purchased it on October 9, 2007 and has been converting the code to the Google systems for sometime now.

By Invitation Only
Jaiku has been on lock down for sometime now and is the only Social Network that I have not been able to access because of it. You need to receive an invitation from someone that has them available to give, and I thank Mike in advance for sharing one of his with me. I’ll certainly give it a spin in the next for hours and if any invitations are available, I try to do my best to share what and when I can if you too are interested.

Support and trouble shooting for any of the plugins or themes I’ve created will be provided in these forums.

The Gaboinked! login widget for WordPress adds several enhancements and personalizations. With the Gaboinked! login widget added to your sidebar, you now have support for Gravatars as well as 3rd Party plugins, WP-openID and Invite Friends. Blog members may register or log in from your blog’s front-end, and get a personalized user experience. It should work with WordPress versions 2.0 and above, but I’ve only tested it on 2.5.1 and 2.6. If anyone find anything different, please let me know!

If you’re wondering what it looks like, I’m using it here on the Gaboink! network blog! Take a look at the top of my sidebar. Although it make look simple, several hours were invested in the customizations and I’ve got bigger fish to fry in the hopper for this project, so I am asking the WordPress community and users of this plugin to make a very small contribution before downloading to help the development of Gaboogle It? for WordPress which this plugin will support. This is only a support donation so upgrades will be FREE, licensed under GPL, contribution is nominal, and the process is painless. The files will be sent to you just after donating!

I am extremely pleased to have stumbled across the Prologue WordPress theme as I’ve been wanting to gain some experience with WordPress theme development, and what better way to do so with a theme that I could customize to suit my personal blogging habit. As a fanatic of Twitter and other microblogging platforms, I decided to fiddle around with the Prologue theme recently released to the public by the folks at Automatic, delivering a Gaboinked! version called Gaboogle?

I am a few tweaks (Not weeks!) away from releasing this theme to the public, but I wanted to share an early preview of the Gaboogle? Prologue WordPress theme with everyone! There are a few custom plugins and added features that are not present in the original Prologue theme, and I will be releasing these to the WordPress community as soon as time permits because they can be used on any WordPress blog.

If you are interested in seeing the Gaboogled Prologue WordPress theme in action, you can do so previewing the demo.

UPDATE:
This theme has gone through many revisions since this post and is now release to the WordPress community. For more information, visit the Prologue Gaboogle? WordPress Theme release page.

With the Facelook Plugin you can easily display a facebook Badge in the Sider Bar of your on a self-hosted WordPress Blog without having to hard-code your WordPress template or use the sometimes unreliable Text Widget. You simply need to create a facebook badge from within your facebook profile. Facelook has been tested on WordPress version 2.5 and should work on any WordPress version 2.3 and above.

Download It:

Downloaded a total of 383 times

Installation:

• Copy the folder to your WordPress plugin directory (wp-content/plugins).
• Create a facebook bade. Be sure to select javascript, NOT an image badge.
• Copy the series of numbers just before the .js in the code provided by facebook.
• Activate the Facelook Plugin.
• Add the Facelook Plugin to your side bar.
• Paste the series or numbers in the configuration and save your changes.

My Facelook Facebook Badge can be seen used in the side bar at http://gaboink.net. Feel free to visit my facebook profile and send me a friend request! If you find Facelook useful, please consider a donation to help future development projects I have in the hopper for the WordPress community, and are greatly appreciated. Please leave a comment letting me know that you are using this widget!

Twitterrific is an application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website. The application’s user interface is clean, concise and designed to provide a very light and small foot-print on your Mac’s desktop. It is extremely configurable and the user interface is above what to be expected from a Mac application, light and straight to the point, with a cool factor.

Free vs. Pay Version
Twitterrific comes in 2 version a free and paid license. As of this post, I downloaded the free version and only assume that a disadvantage of the free version is the occasional advertisements that appear from time to time. The paid version is only $14.95 and I intend to purchase a license for this application as it is a great addition to my micro-blogging tool box.

Other Twitter Application Conflicts may be Flocked!
Unfortunately Twitteriffic does seem to play very well with my Flock Web Browser at the moment. Apparently Twitter only allows 70 request per hour, and with the Flock browser attempting to get it’s updates caused my Twitterrific application to error out stating to avoid running other Twitter applications or refreshing too soon. I certainly was not refreshing, and the only other application running at the time was my Flock Browser logged into Twitter as well.

Screen Shots:

Summary:
Twitterrific is a more than useful tool for micro-bloggers and Twitter users on the Mac OS X platform, and is highly recommended by George! If you are a user of the Flock browser, simply do not log in to your Twitter enabled Flock account until these 2 have figure out how to play together. I have confidence in both of these developing groups and I’m sure that once they are aware of potential conflicts, they will assume a stance to correct the issues.

All-in-all Twitterrific has added value to my day!

Get Twitterrific for OS X

I immediately search the WordPress forums and Google for a solution to no prevail, so I decided to delete every plugin to include my own to find the culprit and I did. I had the WP-SpamFree plugin installed and activated which for some reason has render itself not compatible with the 2.5.1 build of WordPress.

I did not take enough care apparently, because the upgrade directions clearly stated to deactivate any plugins, and I strongly recommend that this step not be ignored or skipped by any WordPress bloggers upgrading in the future.

If you are experiencing the same issue, I recommend starting at the plugin folder and finding the one that may not like the new changes to WordPress 2.5.1. Rest assured that the Gaboinked! Chipin Sidebar Widget for Wordpress is compatible.

Enjoy,