The main purpose of this post is to commend a developer working to make the Empire Avenue community better.  He has created a plug-in we are now using on the Empire Building Network. At the same time, I thought I would mention two other minor new features on the site.

Next, helping promote you.  

The developer that I want to recognize is Olivier Lussier (e)OL.  Here’s how he describes himself on his website.

Hi, my name is Olivier and I am from Québec city, Canada. I am both a PHP and C# programmer and I would like to share tips and tricks with you, hopefully saving you some time on your projects.

As a technology enthusiast I will also share technology-related news and any other cool stuff I find around the web.

Thanks for stopping by! 

As you may have noticed, there is a blue E next to Olivier’s ticker.  He created a WordPress plugin, Empire Avenue Tools, that automatically creates a link to someone’s profile like this (e)OL when we use a bracketed E — just like on the Empire Avenue site.  Not only does this like good for you the reader, it makes it much easier for our authors to include links to profiles. This means people are more easily recognized — thereby supporting many people in the EA community.  His plugin will also add the Empire Avenue badge that we had already installed.  We need to encourage developers.  So, go buy some (e)OL stock.

We have also introduced a new Twitter stream to EBN that will show you Empire Avenue related tweets.  You will see the four most recent tweets in the sidebar and using the link their or the Discussion/Twitter Feed menu, you will find an archive of at least the last 50 messages.  The WordPress plugin providing this functionality is called Tweet Blender.  Thanks to Lance Taylor (e)LAT for showing me this plugin.  I know he is working on a cool app as well that we will showcase here in the future.

Depending on your screen resolution, you may also have noticed we have added support for Facebook and Digg sharing.  We don’t have this working quite right yet, but will keep on it.  Sharing posts, especially after the July 28th, will help get the word out about Empire Avenue and attract more people to come trade.  So, please let people know.

Finally, I mentioned Serhat Marasligil (e)FYZL who created an Empire Building Network logo that I have shared here.  I asked him to send me a brief bio to share here, but didn’t include when I posted the logo.  So, here’s a little bit more about him:

Serhat Maraşlıgil is curently a Public Finance Associate in Denizbank, just before going away for military duty. He is known as a jack-of-all-trades; sound engineering, graphics designing, blogging, drumming and recently buying & selling stocks in Empire Avenue are his highlighted activities during off-work.

Well, that’s it. The Empire Building Network is getting better all the time thanks to the support of many people.  I hope you will consider buying shares in the people mentioned here and our authors listed in the sidebar to the right. By doing so, you are saying thanks for their efforts to give back to the Empire Avenue community.  And when you do, tell them the Empire Building Network sent you.  ;-)