In The Spotlight Marketing, Inc. is launching our new website and digital social networking tool, Hilite™. We are excited about our new site and tool. You are among a select group to be the first to experience our new vision.

The reason I am sharing this with you is because I respect and value your input. Over the next week, I would appreciate you taking 15 minutes of your time and reviewing our site and creating your free Hilite™. As part of your review, we would like to have your feedback and comments on your overall experience. To reward you for taking the time to check out our new site and create your free Hilite™, you will be entered into a drawing for $100 VISA gift card.

In order to be entered into the drawing, please create your free Hilite™ and complete our brief survey that will be sent upon completion of your Hilite™. On the survey, please don’t forget to leave your name and contact information and Michael Crane as your referral in question 10. Oh, and please LIKE us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and if you have LinkedIn, connect with us.

We look forward to receiving your feedback and opinions on how we can better our product and services making this a great success for all!

Step into the light NOW by clicking this link: ITS-Marketing.com

Thank You for your time and support,

Mike

For those of you that follow MikesPickz on twitter, you will remember that two nights ago MikesPickz was off-line over night for some maintenance. I am proud to report that the maintenance went very well and there are new features for your enjoyment. Recently, WordPress released WordPress 3.0 which offered many new features to blog owners. In order to increase your viewing pleasure, I took down the website and cleaned the database and did some rearranging under the hood of MikesPickz. There are several new things in the works for MikesPickz:

• First, now posts that have pictures will display a thumbnail on the homepage
• The navigation menu will be getting a few small tweaks over the next few days
• Articles will begin to be published more frequently
• I will be introducing a brand new Movies and Music corner this weekend. There will be movie reviews and music spotlights, interested in writing? Contact me – info (at) mikespickz.com
• Speaking of writing, I am currently in the process of looking for people interested in writing guest posts or writing on a more frequent basis.
• Also, I have begun the process of porting the custom MikesPickz theme into one available to the public
• Lastly, now that WordPress offers multi-site support, if you are interested in your own blog and want more functionality than WordPress.com, but don’t have the technical skills or time to purchase hosting and install WordPress.org, then I am the host for you. Contact me for more details

I hope you enjoy the new and improved MikesPickz experience!

• The website was completely reformatted from strictly (X)HTML to PHP based. This change will allow more dynamic web pages to be added in the future.
• The navigation was completely re-done, after rigorous testing it was decided that the old navigation wasn’t highlighting the pages that my visitors most wanted to see. The new navigation hopes to allow for easier navigation of MikesPickz. A list of the changes will be displayed under the navigation for the next several weeks.
• The home page was re-styled from a two column layout to a three column layout. This was done to reduce scroll time and to move more of the important information to the top of the page.
• A Contact Form was added to allow visitors to ask questions and to comment on the website more easily.
• The MLB Weekly Review page and the Leader Board page was combined with the MikesPickz Sports Section Blog. These pages were combined because I felt it made more logical sense to keep all of the sports information pages together in one place.

Feel free to post any comments that you have about the new look of MikesPickz below.

Now some might say, why go through all of the trouble if its on the single page that will be good enough, but I didn’t want to show summaries on my blog home page in case no-one clicks the title. I am sure that you have read a blog from the home page at some point in your blog reading days.

Well, here the tutorial is:

It has bit.ly URL shortening built in, I like bit.ly because of the live tracking of the shortened URLs.

The first code you have to add is this:

<?php { ?>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=tweettrackjs&apiKey=R_7e9987b2fd13d7e4e881f9cbb168f523"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01"></script>
<?php } ?>

Now, if you have a free account with bit.ly, change where it says “login=tweettrackjs” with “login=(username)” and replace “apiKey=R_7e9987b2fd13d7e4e881f9cbb168f523″ with “apiKey=(your API key)”

You add that code right in front of the tag in header.php which is located in your theme’s folder.

The next piece of code is to add it to the individual blog page (because someone might click the title and you want it to be there)

<!--Add Tweet this-->
<div align="right"><a href="#" target="_blank" onclick="return TweetAndTrack.open(this, '<?php echo get_permalink();?>');"><span style="display:none;">« <?php the_title();?></span><img src=(your image location)" alt="Tweet This" /> Tweet This</a></div>
<!--End Tweet this-->

Now, if you want there to be an image with the link change <img src=”(your image location)” alt=”Tweet This” /> and where it says (your image location), insert the location of the image you want to use (be sure to upload the image to your server if it is your image. Feel free to save the image below and use that if you want. If you don’t want an image just delete <img src=”(your image location)” alt=”Tweet This” /> and it will be a text link that says “Tweet This”

Now you add that code to the single.php page which is also located in your theme’s folder, add it right below:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this entry »</p>'); ?>

Now for the tricky part to add it to the home page for each post and still have it link to the actual blog post, not the home page. To do this you have to find this code in the index.php page which is also located in the your theme’s folder.

<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p>

Replace the above code with the following code:

<p class="postmetadata"> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?> | <!--Add Tweet this--><a href="#" target="_blank" onclick="return TweetAndTrack.open(this, '<?php echo get_permalink();?>');"><span style="display:none;">« <?php the_title();?></span><img src="(your image location)" alt="Tweet This" /> Tweet This</a><!--End Tweet this--><br /><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?></p>

Be sure to add your image location to the designated area –> <img src=”(your image location)” alt=”Tweet This” />

Now you save and upload everything to your server and you’re done.

When the link is clicked, Twitter will open with the Tweet box filled in with:
(the bit.ly link) « (your article title)

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment this post and I will answer all questions.

Hope you find this tutorial useful and check out the MikesPickz: Sports Section for articles on anything and everything related to Sports.

As always, be sure to follow me on Twitter, @ MikesPickz for continuous news from the world of Sports, Music and Movies.

I hope you enjoy the MikesPickz Sports Section.