The first thing you will want to do is head over to their Google +1 create a button page.  From there, you first select the size of the button you wish to use:

• Small (15px)
• Medium (20px)
• Standard (24px)
• Tall (60px)

Once that is done, you can click on the link that reads, "Advanced options" to tweak a few more things, such as if you want to include the count, parse, JS callback function and the URL to +1.  The final step is to copy and paste the code they provide to you and place it into your own website.

Google has been grasping at straws for a while to find a way for people to share content, in the same way that Facebook does it.  You have to believe they would love to have that data in their own hands, and this is one way they hope to make that happen. 

All you need to do to get started is point your browser towards thin.gs and then type in the link you wish to shorten.  Next, you hit the "Short it" button and then copy your link.  They also have a pretty basic, but still useful API to play with too.  To use it, just point your browser to:

http://thin.gs/api.php?url=yourdomain.com

Where "yourdomain.com" is the web address you want to shorten.  You can also drag and drop this bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar to use thin.gs on any website to shorten any link.

Want to try it out for yourself? Head on over to thin.gs.

Within the last couple of weeks, I have taken a new writing job over at The Hosting News.  This is a little ‘bit different beat that my usual posts I write because I am doing news coverage for them rather than opinion or tutorial based content. 

Check out a few of the posts I have written thus far, and let me know what you think:

• Terran Marketing Purchases WebSiteHosting.com
• The New Net Approaches – Introducing IPV6
• Egyptian Internet Access Restored
• Moving Forward After SourceForge Hack
• ISPs Face Possible Mandatory Data Retention Again

Also, go check out The Hosting News and look around a ‘bit.  The new guys behind the scenes have really done a lot to modernize the layout of the website and provide a lot of great content for people interested in learning more about web hosting and the industry around it.

Did you share something on your Twitter page about a month ago and now can not seem to remember the URL? Facebook, Twitter and the like do not make it very easy to go through the archives to dig up old content.  Thankfully, Trunk.ly is here to archive things for you.  This awesome website will automatically collect links you share on Facebook, Twitter and Delicious and make them searchable for you.

This is really helpful for Delicious users out there who have just recently found out that Yahoo is looking to shut down that service.  Trunk.ly makes it really easy to import those links, back them up and make them searchable. I am really excited to see how much of a fan base grows around this new service and what other import features they might bring in the future. 

It never hurts to have a backup of your socially shared links and Trunk.ly makes doing so really easy.  You can also follow or share your collected links with other too.  You can check out my Trunk.ly profile and see how easy it is to get started with the service.

8-Bit Mashup Wallpaper

So a black mage, Mario, Kirby and Mega Man walk into a bar (and stop me if you have heard this one) and happen to make some really cool wallpaper in world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. OK, maybe I need to work on the punch line but while we are talking about great wallpaper, I wanted to share this with you.

Super Wallpaper (for Any Man)

How could I share Batman wallpaper with you, without tossing in some Superman wallpaper into the mix too?  Filed under a random Google image search, this background is actually pretty nice in comparison with some of the dull Superman backgrounds you can find out there.  Worthy of any super desktop, no matter if you are from Earth or Krypton.

Over 70 Fun Instant Sound Effects

The instant sound effect web sites are always fun, but I think Instants took it to a whole new level.  This web site has over 70 sound effect buttons you can play with to annoy your coworkers or keep handy for a special occasion.

Wallpapers Organize Desktop Icon Clutter

Looking for a very simple way to organize your mess of icons on your desktop?  Look no further than this very slick and simple wallpaper I ran across a few weeks ago.

Find the Perfect User Name

Need an easier way to find the perfect user name?  When looking for a user name, you want one that has not been taken before, and is available via all the popular social networks – and maybe even as a domain name.  If you are in search of a helping hand in your search, NameChecklist is the place to check first.

20 Best Multimedia Plugins for WordPress

WordPress is a great publishing platform to use when you want to circulate your own collection of video or images on the Web.  Thanks to a few great plugins, you can take your dull text-based blog and really snaz it up with some great internet imagery.  Want to great a photo gallery?  Want to plug YouTube into your web site?  I have collected twenty of the best multimedia plugins for you to use with your own WordPress powered web site.

3 Best WordPress Cheat Sheets

Working with WordPress is almost like learning a new language.  Not only do you need to learn some of the basic fundamentals of PHP, but you also need to learn what WordPress tags go where, and what they do. Since nobody has the time to do that these days, I thought it would be about time to break out my WordPress cheat sheet collection.

3 More Masterful Zelda Wallpapers

The search continues for some of the best Legend of Zelda wallpapers out there on the Web.  Having shared two with you already, I figured I would bundle these three find together and share them with you too.

Fat Princess: Fat Roles DLC Review

Ready to battle as giants, ninjas and pirates?  The PlayStation Network game Fat Princess finally got its first slice of downloadable content, and I do have to say it has made the game a whole lot more fun.   Fat Princess: Fat Roles is out and is a lot of fun.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Fat Princess

I have spent a lot of my free time the last few months playing Fat Princess, a PlayStation Network game for the PlayStation 3.  Over time, you come to lean a few things you should do – and a few things you probably shouldn’t do, to keep the experience enjoyable.

Hope you enjoyed this list and you keep enjoying Mitchelaneous throughout 2010, 2011 and beyond! Thank you for your support!

Search engine optimization is another form of marketing, you you might not have thought was marketing before.  SEO, at it’s core, is the process of improving visibility of a website in search engines by learning what works and what doesn’t work – as far as website content goes. Your website is one of the most important ways you can reach new eyeballs or clients, so lets learn more about how you can do so more successfully. 

Here are my top ten marketing search engine optimization tweaks you should make to your layout.

1. Make sure you setup a XML sitemap and get it submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo.  This gives each of these big search engines a roadmap as to what you want indexed, and how important each webpage is.
2. Make sure that each page has a unique set of meta tags and a unique title too.  You want these details to reflect the content of the webpage you are looking at.
3. Find other websites that share content like yours, and see what you can do to get links coming from their website to yours.  You might offer a link exchange, or something more.  Use your imagination.
4. Create a website that is easy to use.  This will do more to build up your popularity with people, and in turn could result in more links back to your website content.
5. Do not be afraid to not index certain pages that might be seen by Google ad duplicate content.  For example, on my own websites I never ask for the search engines to index any of the category pages.  It is much more valuable if they index each story or post I write.
6. Pay attention to your website statistics.  You can use the statistics package your website hosting came with, or another tool like Google Analytics to quickly see what your popular pages are.  Once you see the popular pages, start to check out the keywords and sources of traffic – so you can try to duplicate this same thing that made that webpage popular again.
7. Use the headline tag hierarchy correctly.  When writing up a webpage, make sure the h1 tag goes at the top, h2 is next, and then h3 and so forth if you need them.  Not only does this make your webpage more usable by the reader – search engines also like it when you correctly divide your content up using these HTML tags.
8. Do not get too worked up over what a website’s Google PageRank is.  It is only one small part in how Google ranks websites and lists them in the search engine results.  Just because website has a high PageRank number, that does not mean it will get listed first in the search engine results.
9. Write excellent content.  This one might seem like a no brainer, but you would be amazed by the number of people who come to me with one sentence on a webpage and then ask me why they are not getting listed in search engine results. Search engines love content – feed it to them.
10. Give people something they want to link back to.  Some people might say link baiting is bad, but in all honesty it is just excellent content that people want to share. 

One more thing you should remember is that there is no perfect science when it comes to optimizing your website content for the search engines.  It is much more a process of trial and error.  These basic tips though should help you set the foundation for a great website you can use to market your ideas, products or whatever else you have to market to the public.

Those web sites that highlight some terms to give you little micro-web site pop ups that describe what that word is about are pretty cool.  Butns is a service that will enable you to do the same in a number way different ways.

Here is an example:

As you can see, when you hover over my name, linked above, you can then select to search about me on Google, Bing, Yahoo or YouTube.  You can customize the destinations for each hyperlink to suit your own needs.

This video should help explain how the tool works in 60 seconds:

Currently it supports search tools, social tools, personal links, media links, news, reference, science shopping or custom URLs.

Overall this is a unique new tool that everybody should check out.  By inserting a Butns hyperlink (rather than a normal one) your users have more choices when it comes to where they would like to go.

Build your own customized hyperlink at Butns.com.

Popularity among the masses goes a long way these days to building a successful franchise.  One my my favorite new gaming franchises to follow the past six months or so has been Fat Princess.   This over the top capture the flag game with fat princess is tons of fun, and has an ever growing community.

Here are some of the best Fat Princess community sites out there today.

The PlayStation Forums for Fat Princess

This is obviously the biggest and most active community, because it is run by Sony themselves.  Here you can read about glitches, clans or just discuss your favorite way to rescue the fatty in distress.

The Throne Room

A great new set of forums, more focused toward giving visitors everything that the Sony-run forums do not. You have more specific content and categories here, geared towards the “clan” aspect of the Fat Princess game and a lot of other topics to keep people coming back for more.

Fan Princess

One of the few blog-based fan web sites out there, Fan Princess seems to come back and die off a lot.  When it is up and running though, they do have a lot of interesting topics and discussions posted there.  If you are looking for more Fat Princess news-like content, this is the place to go.

The Cake Lair

Another new set of forums for that Fat Princess-loving community, The Cake Lair has tons of potential.  In the future, they hope to have more tutorials and talk about strategy, video tutorials on how to master all the various classes and a lot more.

That is all that I know of – do you know of any others?  If so, feel free to leave them in the comments.  Also, feel free to come play Fat Princess with me anytime, my PlaySation Network ID is cheasym.

Now that Google Buzz is out in the wild, your Google profile page deserves a little more attention.  So, what all have you done to spruce up your own profile page?  I’ll share with you some of the things I did to make this a much more informative page about me for Googlers to find.

First things first, you need to setup your Google profile page.  If you are logged into Google in any way (for example, with a Gmail account) this is fairly easy to do.  All you need to do is set it up at Google.com/profiles.

Once you fill out all the basic information, then you might want to start thinking about what pages you want to show up in the links section.

To add custom links, just go to your Google profile page, click on Edit Profile, then scroll down to the Links section.  You should see several links Google knows about, that you have given it before – then you can also add your own.  I have added links to all my various web pages, and then my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace profiles.

Next, you should setup Google Buzz via your Gmail account.  Once you do, anything you post via Google buzz – you will automatically share on your Google profile page.

Feel free to visit my Google profile page if you need some inspiration.

Now there are a lot more various boxes and basic you can fill out via the Google profile page, but they are all pretty self explanatory.  With the tips I gave you here, you can use your Google profile page as a social landing page for your own work and also a better way to let people know who you are and what you do.

It is that time of the year where every news source out there gets so lax in creating content, they can only muster up the strength to put together a year in review for this, that or the other.  Never to be one to disappoint, I thought now would be the perfect time to join the masses and share with you your favorite things I have posted.

Here are the ten most popular stories, tips, articles and tutorials I published in 2009 on Mitchelaneous.com.

#10 – Instant Drama Sound Effect

My new favorite web site, when you need that instant sound effect action is DramaButton.com.  Once pushed, you get that duh duh DUHHHH that has always been a favorite for the old dramatic moments on your favorite old TV shows and movies.

• More Sound Effect Fun: Six and a Half Instant Sound Effect Sites to Keep Handy

#9 – Top 10 Horror Movie Villains

Since it is October, time to look at even more things that go bump in the night.  Growing up in the 80s to early 90s era, I had a lot of great horror villains to fighting me.  We might not have had Dracula or Frankenstein, but we did have Freddy and Jason.  So, to keep with the holiday spirit of the month, I decided to take a look at my top 10 horror villains of all time.

• More Top 10 – Top 10 Favorite Red Dwarf Moments

#8 – 10 Free Ways to Search for Files Online

Need to find a file fast?  Over the years, I have collected some of the best (and maybe not so best) free file search web sites out there.  Here are the ten best resources to search for a file online.

• More Free Stuff – Hundreds of Free Online Tools I’ve Reviewed

#7 – Ninja Entry Traffic Sign Rocks

When is a No Entry sign not a No Entry sign?  When it has dropped the smoke bomb and turned into a Ninja Entry traffic sign.

• More Oddness: The Green Ranger Morphed into a MMA Fighter

#6 – Need a Wiki? Top Alternatives to MediaWiki!

Looking to setup a new wiki, but don’t know which script you should pick up to do the dirty work?  Many might say that MediaWiki is the best and the most popular, since it is what is used to run Wikipedia.  However, there are some great alternative wiki scripts you might have (or might not have) even seen before.

• More CMS Help – 9 WordPress Alternatives

#5 – EMFF – Easily the Best Audio Player via Flash

The Easy Musicplayer For Flash, or otherwise known as EMFF, is in my opinion easily the best free audio player, built in flash.  I have been using it to provide a player on up to six of my latest shows on webhostingshow.com.

• More Web Dev Help – Best of the Blogging Scripts

#4 – Down Right Creepy Mario Wallpaper

Why is it that we are all kind of amused by making Nintendo’s favorite plumber, Mario, so darn creepy looking?  There have been some real oddities posted out there in the past that have put a new light on the overall wearing hero,  but this one might take the cake on being the creepiest thus far.

• More Desktop Decoration – All My Favorite Wallpapers I’ve Blogged About!

#3 – Decorate Your Desktop with Mushroom Icons!

Time to do another free desktop icon release!  This time around, I figured I would focus on Mario’s favorite treat, the mushrooms of the Mushroom kingdom.  It always kind of freaked me out that a power up was a decapitated head of one of the Mushroom Kingdom citizens.  What do you think Toad would say if he saw Mario eat a mushroom?  Would he be shocked?  Could be they are all cannibals anyways.

• Level Up! – Free Mega Man Desktop Icons!

#2 – Charge PS3 Controller on Your PC

As I shared with you yesterday, I purchased myself a PlayStation 3.  One of the first questions I had after taking it out of the box was, “How do I charge the controllers?”.  With my Wii, it uses rechargeable batteries, so that solution was a ‘bit easier.  it looks like the PS3 controllers though have no option to do that.

• More Video Game Fun – Free Video Game Based Desktop Icons!

#1 – Best of the Free Zombie Flash Games

Nothing can get better than beating up a few mindless zombies, right?  Put that together with some of the creative and cool flash games out there, and you my friend have a good time.  Here is my collection of some of the best free “zombie-related” flash games.

• More Flash Games – Best of the Free Ninja Flash Games

I hope you have enjoyed this year of Mitchelaneous fun, and hope 2010 brings in even more readers, visits, fun stories and more.  Happy New Year to you all!

EXTRA – Best Firefox Facts Posts of 2009!