Social Media with ThePlanetD

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Did you know that there are many other ways to connect with and enjoy theplanetd on the Internet besides having to type in our address each day?

You can receive emails updates in your inbox or blog feeds daily on your homepage. You don’t have to worry about checking our site to see what is up, we can come to you.

We love talking with travelers outside of the Canada’s Adventure Couple website and we thought that we would take today to tell you about other places on the internet that we spend time on regularly.

Let us Look to the Right of our Blog

See those funny looking circles on the right of the page under connect with us?
Have you ever wondered what that picture of the little bear holding the book in his hands means?
Why should you subscribe to us and what does that mean?

We really do want you to connect with us at some of our favorite social media sites.  For those of you that know all about these sites, head on over to our side bar and connect with us if you already haven’t.

For the rest of you that are wondering just what all the fuss is about Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned below for a little information.

Starting from the Top Right and Working our Way Down the Blog

Sign Up for our Monthly Newsletter - Don’t have time to read every article at the PlanetD.com? Each month we send out a newsletter to your email address with highlights of what we did each month. We never share your email address with anyone and we never send spam messages.  The only thing you get is an update on PlanetD news. We discuss our travels, our insider tips on what we have learned and links to some of the most informative sites on the Internet for travel information.

Post Updates through RSS - People are often confused as to what RSS is.  What is stands for is “Really Simple Sydication” When you sign up for post updates through RSS, you receive our new posts each day directly into your email inbox or as a part of your reader homepage.  Add us to your home page and our new posts will show up alongside your other favorite websites.
When you click on the feedburner logo, you will be directed to a page that lets you choose what reader you prefer. If you use igoogle as your home page our links will show up there, if you prefer Yahoo to hold all your favorite sites, our link will show up on that page. It is a great tool that allows you to browse your favorite blogs from your homepage to see if you want to read that article today.  Instead of having to type in the web address and visit our site we come to you.

Twitter - We have all heard about Ashton Kutcher and his twitter antics with Demi Moore, but what does twitter mean for the average person? What can we really say in 140 characters? As it turns out a lot.  Twitter has become one of the top social media sharing websites on the Internet.  Corporations are seeing the importance of Twitter and website owners are seeing the benefit of using Twitter to drive traffic to their websites.
We have made incredible connections with Twitter, not only through business opportunities like Princess Cruises Follow Me At Sea, but we have also made great true friends through Twitter.  Travel Bloggers are some of the most giving people in the world and everyone loves to help each other out by sharing each others websites and posts with their followers.

All you have to do is find something great on the Internet, shorten it’s address with tools like bit.ly, share it with your friends and put in a little blurb as to why you think it is great.  The more you share on Twitter, the more love you receive back and the more connections you will make.

Facebook - The most popular social site on the Internet is a great way to stay connected with your faraway friends. As travelers, we don’t get to see our friends and family as much as we would like, but we can stay up to date with their activities on Facebook. It can be as public or as private as you want it to be. Of course Dave and I are a couple of open books, and not only do we have our own private Facebook pages, we have a PlanetD Round The World Adventures fan page. People can leave messages, ask questions, find other travelers and even post photos on our page. We are trying to encourage more conversation with other travelers and Facebook is a great way to do so.

Join our fanpage and  you don’t even have to leave Facebook to read our latest posts. It will show up in your newsfeed and you can decide whether or not you feel like reading our post today.

StumbleUpon - If you are not in the Blogging community, chances are you have not heard of StumbleUpon. We hadn’t, but you don’t need to be a blogger to like to Stumble. StumbleUpon is an excellent social site to find like minded people that enjoy the same content that you do on the Internet. As you start to rate articles by giving them a thumbs up or a thumbs down, StumbleUpon will start to know your likes and dislikes and recommend articles that you will like. You will be able to find friends and share content with them and will be able to find some incredible and unique Internet content.

Like all social media sites, the more you give the more you get. If you rate a lot of content on StumbleUpon, more people will connect with you and your content will be stumbled into the system more often.

YouTube - The first and the best. The very first social media site we ever joined was YouTube. That is why our Youtube account name is Wegobyebye instead of ThePlanetD. We shot video, up loaded them to youtube and hoped that people would watch a few.  It turns out, people love watching videos.  The Internet is filled with short attention spans. People enjoy watching video and looking at pictures more than reading and youtube is the proof. Put up a funny, offbeat and entertaining video and it just may go viral. Careers have been made on youtube. (yes, we mean you Justin Beiber)

We have a lot of video to edit this summer and we will be posting new ones weekly starting two weeks from now. Don’t miss our shenanaggins, join the youtube party.

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Twitter Problems, Internet Frustrations

Let’s start with technical difficulties.

As much as I love the Internet, the technical side of things really freaks me out sometimes.

You put a lot of work into networking a marketing and really you have no control over anything.  We have worked hard on establishing ourselves on Twitter and to have to start all over so close to leaving for Asia would be a real bummer.  We had decided to focus on Twitter as our main form of networking. We thought that it would be the best and easiest way for us to connect with other travelers and Bloggers while we are traveling.  We did a good job too.  We have developed great friendships, Topsy lists us as “highly influential” we have gained a nice amount of followers quickly and frankly, we love Twitter.

Last week we noticed that someone posted an ad from our profile on Twitter.  It said something like…”I just signed up for a rewards program” and it had a link to website.  We quickly deleted it because first of all we didn’t post it and second we didn’t want someone clicking through to a malicious site from our name @theplanetd.  We were nervous that someone had hacked our account so we quickly changed our password and deleted any third party applications that we didn’t recognize in our connections.

Everything was fine and we felt better…

but here is where we think that troubles began.

We didn’t change our password with the 3rd party applications that we left on our Twitter account and one or more of them was obviously trying to gain access.  These third party sites are Tweetdeck, wefollow, twit this etc.  If they keep trying to access your account without the valid password too many times, Twitter will lock your account.

So here is what we did…

1. We could not sign in from the twitter home page.  But when we clicked on the “forgot password” icon we could access Twitter through the link that they sent to our email.  However, once we logged out, we were locked out again.
2. If we went to Twitter help we stayed signed in so we could access our account for some reason, so we did that.
3. We could not find anywhere on the support page where we could let Twitter know that we were having problems.  We had read that you could send them a ticket, but we could not find a way to contact them anywhere.  And we went of the support section with a magnifying glass.  There is just no way to contact them. We clicked on every link from that page and even if your click on contact us at the bottom of the Twitter feed, it just goes right back to the help page when you click on support.  If anyone knows how to get a hold of them, I would love to hear it.
4. We went into our connections settings and revoked access to all 3rd party applications for now.
5. We signed back in after waiting an hour and everything worked fine.

So we are back on Twitter.  However, we have Tweetdeck etc. disabled for now. I don’t want to sign back into them yet. I think that I will just give it a few days.

I will keep you posted if it happens again.

Other Frustrations

Does anyone else have a problem with Throttling on their site?  We have points where people throttle our account to the point that it freezes our site.  We use Bluehost and at times we have spammers hit our site hundreds of times in a minute causing the site to slow down or stop.

Once our site was down for quite a while so Dave went online with Bluehost.  They told him that certain sites were basically attacking ours and that we have to block them.  What we do is go into our Bluehost Control panel and click on CPU Throttling.  Sometimes it is through the roof.  They told us that we have to block those ip addresses that are hitting us.  Man, that is a lot of work.

Just to clarify…it is not the usual spam that Askimet catches, this doesn’t affect us at all,  it is bandwidth throttling. Which I still don’t really understand.

Do other people have this problem with different providers? Are we just having bad luck this month?

I must admit, that Bluehost’s customer care is excellent however.  Whenever we have an issue and contact them, they are right there to help us out.

Speeding up our site

I also really need to work on making our site faster.  People could say that it is the featured video in the side bar, but many people have video streaming from youtube and it doesn’t slow them down.  We have thought that maybe it is because of the featured content slider on the home page, but a lot of people have that as well and their sites are fast.

We have cleaned up errors and we have installed super cache but that hasn’t sped up the site.  We are definitely needing to solve this little mystery.  I don’t like waiting for a blog to load, so I definitely don’t want people to have to wait for our blog.

So anyway, that is our week in review this week.  Just annoying technical difficulties.

Outside of the blog things are moving along well.

• We have been moving our contents to storage and have made quite the dent in our apartment.  It looks like moving day is going to be pretty manageable.
• We are bringing in our Visa Application for India tomorrow
• Doctors visits are done.
• Optomitrist – ?
• We have bought our new camera and camcorder – That is a post for Dave to write about in the near future
• We are all packed. I know it is early, but we don’t use anything that we are bringing with us.
• All medications and first aid – ?

For some reason I am getting busier at work as time gets closer.  On one hand I enjoy making the extra money, on the other, I have a lot to do and work is really getting in my way. Dave is busy as usual, so time is just flying by.  We are both feeling a little anxious.  No excitement brewing yet. We are too busy checking off the to do list.

So that is what we have done this week.

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