Use Buffer to Retweet into LinkedIn

In May, the team at Buffer announced some updates to their browser extension components which allow you to schedule Tweets from within twitter.com, and also to schedule retweets.

However, because of the way that the Buffer extensions work, this opens up a solution to the problem of Tweets piped into LinkedIn status updates becoming un-shareable on LinkedIn.

This is a problem I wrote about recently over on Social Mii so I won't cover it again in detail here, except to repeat one of the screenshots which describes the problem (click on all the images in this post to enlarge them):

The issue here is a lack of a LinkedIn "share" link when Tweets are piped directly into LinkedIn from Twitter.

The ability to schedule retweets using Buffer allows you to also share the update with other social media networks, including LinkedIn. Here's an example of the process in action.

We start with the Tweet we wish to retweet. As we have the Buffer extension installed, the twitter.com page now includes the "Buffer" link, along with the Buffer icon:

Click on the Buffer link, and the normal Buffer extension dialogue appears, with the original Tweet shown with the "RT @user:" retweet prefix. In this example, the addition of this prefix pushes the text to over 140 characters, which is too much for Twitter, so it does need to be edited down slightly.

Note that the Buffer accounts list include my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, which means that this update will go to both social networks. Click "Add to Buffer", and the post will be added.

We now check the Buffer schedule and find both the Twitter and LinkedIn updates are in place:

One other thing to add is that the LinkedIn share allows for additional information to be displayed from any link included in the Tweet, and although Buffer supports this, it isn't included here. However, all is not lost, as we can now edit the LinkedIn item by using the "edit this post" button in Buffer. We only need to make a minor change to the text (such as adding a space) and Buffer will go off and fetch the additional information, and update the post:

So now we can effectively and quickly retweet from Twitter into other social networks, including LinkedIn, and once in LinkedIn, our updates can be easily shared by others in our network:

Development Environment Must-Haves: Development and Test

For any serious development environment, creating properly partitioned development and test environments is essential. Let's work backwards from production, and look at our expectations when we deploy to each environment.

Photo credit: gothopotam on Flickr

In production, we expect and demand nothing less than correct operation when we deploy a new version of our application. We expect this environment to be permanently available. If there are any problems, they must be specific to the production environment only. We can reduce the probability of this occurring by using a "regression" or as-live environment.

In regression, we know that our application has been fully tested, but we expect to encounter problems related to configuration changes or perhaps database versioning issues. We expect this environment to be permanently available as production, but accept there may be problems from time to time. By encountering these in regression, we are able to address the issues before our application makes it into production. We make sure that our application is performing as per specification and that there are no defects, by using a system test environment.

In system test, we know that our application works, in that it starts up and functions, however business functionality and overall operation has not been independently tested. We expect this environment to be generally available during testing, but accept that new releases may bring in problems which have to be addressed, and also that the application may fail during testing due to major defects. We expect to encounter these issues as well as some relating to the configuration of the environment and resources it uses, such as databases. However, we can have confidence that our application basically works, by using a development environment.

In development, nothing is guaranteed. The application may or may not work, for reasons which will be investigated by development staff. The development environment is used to ensure that released applications are basically sound, and configuration issues explored. We expect this environment to be generally available, but accept that certain tasks during the development phase may require it to be extensively rebuilt or reconfigured.

Applications (as created by your continuous integration build cycle) should be released to each environment in turn, and where problems are found, be prepared to back track and rework - and start the cascading release process again once the fixes are in place.

If you ever find yourself deploying to production and changing the production database because of a bug or change to requirements, and then back-propagating to development, you have a major problem!

In this short series I'm outlining the tools you really do need for a professional quality software development environment. Many of them will seem like common sense to many of you. Many of them have been inexplicably missing from development environments I've seen over the past few years. The list isn't meant to be "the final solution" - you may have these things, you may have alternatives, you may have nothing at all - in which case you know where to start.

Running Competitions on Pinterest

Vancouver retailer Briers Home & Gift is running a competition using Pinterest, until the end of June. You can enter by pinning items from their online store catalogue on to your Pinterest board and then submitting the pin URL on the Briers web site.

What's interesting about the competition is that it has multiple streams, using a combination of random draws of pins (weekly, and at the end of the competition), a tally of re-pins and likes for each pin submitted, and the good old judges-decision-is-final who can create the coolest board on Pinterest.

The downside, perhaps, is that the entry process is a bit clunky - pinning is of course quite quick, but the form filling process afterwards is more fiddly. I'm sure there's some scope for a bookmarklet or similar time-saving tool to be created to help with this... I may have my coding hat on later in the week.

You can find out more and watch the video on the Briers web site. The competition is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, so it's worth taking a look not only to see how they're doing it, but also to take part!

LinkedIn Usage Patterns Emerge

There are virtually no changes to the usage pattern for connections in my LinkedIn network during April 2012, on a network which grew only very slightly over the month.

I'm expecting this to settle into a regular pattern, showing that the majority still use LinkedIn for growing their networks rather than interacting with them, although I would also expect this to change over longer timescales as more people learn how to make better use of LinkedIn.

Click on the link below the summary chart to see the full page, with charts created in HTML5 using RGraph.

Click to view full size

Friday Round-Up

Photo credit: PhillipC on Flickr

The Friday Round-Up has moved! And improved, with the standard Twitter Javascript interface replaced by a static page - so no more waiting for it to load. But, it's still on Friday and it's a still a Round-Up of web bits, and it's here: http://bit.ly/IVvJWX

Development Environment Must-Haves: Continuous Integration

Photo credit: MeriaDuck

Use Continuous Integration to automate the quality control process so that you include some quality assurance during development, rather than leave it all to the end. The pre-requisites for this are:

• Source code control using, for example, Subversion
• A standard build process using, for example, ant
• A set of unit tests which exercise the application code as fully as possible

With these in place you can deploy a continuous integration tool such as CruiseControl, Hudson or Jenkins to automate the following tasks:

• Get the latest code base and build it whenever it changes
• Run unit tests against the built code
• Create versions for the release cycle
• Package all components including code and any support files

In such an environment, it becomes possible to:

• Fetch the "current" version of the application easily
• Spot coding problems as soon as they are introduced
• Ensure that all tests are run whenever your application is changed

In this short series I'm outlining the tools you really do need for a professional quality software development environment. Many of them will seem like common sense to many of you. Many of them have been inexplicably missing from development environments I've seen over the past few years. The list isn't meant to be "the final solution" - you may have these things, you may have alternatives, you may have nothing at all - in which case you know where to start.

Monthly LinkedIn Data Analysis

Previously I have described how to extract data from your network using the LinkedIn API, and how I am now storing that data in order to be able to analyse it more fully.

Now that I have another month's worth of data, I've expanded the summary page to include charts for last month as well as this, and for both I've added a new chart which represents any activity on LinkedIn, be it new connections or a profile update.

During March, the shares situation is almost unchanged from February, but more than half made new connections, while the total activity increased very slightly. My network grew by approximately 10% during the month, so there will be some inaccuracy due to the fact that full data will not be available for newer connections.

Click on the link below the summary chart to see the full page:

Click to view full size