Now that Facebook auto-subscribes you to everything you “Like,” whether that’s via the button or just something you mentioned in your profile, your news feed can quickly become so cluttered that it’s difficult to know what update is coming from whom.
That’s where Facebook’s Lists become very helpful. If you group similar people together in a list, you can easily view news from only those sources, providing better context, more quickly, with more of the posts you actually want to see.
First, let’s create a list. Click “Friends” from the left column on the page. Then, near the top right corner of the main column you’ll see the button “Create A List.”
The first step is to give your list a name.
Next, pick the people you want to include in this list. For my “Cincy Network” group, I’m picking all the local people I’ve met at networking events. But you can also pick relevant pages, so in this case, I’m checking a few feeds that will keep me up to date on what’s happening in town.
Now when you want to check your feed for only that group, just click the “Friends” link in the left column, and the name of the group just below it. You’ll see a news feed you can quickly scan, knowing the context for everyone who appears on it.
Creating Friend Lists has another benefit as well. Say your friends from high school aren’t interested in industry-related links you’ll post for everybody else, or maybe you’d like to share some personal pictures with only your family and closest friends.
As you’re filling in a post on your wall, click the privacy pulldown menu (the padlock) and select “Custom.”
The next menu asks who should see the post. Select “Specific People.”
Start typing the name of your group, and a selectable group name should appear below the box. Save this setting, and your post will only go to members of your Friend List.
Like many things in Facebook, using Friend Lists can be a little cumbersome. It would be nice if it were easier to use. For example, the names of your Lists could show up in the privacy pulldown menu to save two steps. But once you get used to it, you can get more out of your Facebook experience by categorizing your connections.
Adding a Facebook Like button to your blog can be done manually in just a few steps. There are plugins to manage this for you, but I wanted to aggregate all of my likes onto the the main blog URL, rather than splitting them up for individual posts, as is most commonly done in the plug-ins.
Getting the Like Button Code
To put the Like button in my sidebar. I took a screenshot and measured it to find out my theme has a sidebar that’s 250 pixels wide.
First, I visited the Facebook Like Button page to get the code. I put my blog’s main URL in the box, along with a width of 250. You can set a few other options such as whether or not to include pictures and which of the 6 available fonts you’d like to use.
Clicking the “Get Code” button brings up two text boxes with code to insert the Like button on your site.
The first box is an iframe. It’s a little simpler, in that you only need to insert one bit of code instead of two. But it’s worth the extra step to get the XFMBL code in the second box. This will do a better job of scaling the box vertically to match how much content is actually in it. The iframe code can leave a big gaping hole in your sidebar if you don’t have a long list of fans.
Using the Like Box Instead
If your blog already has a Facebook Page, people who “Like” your blog can automatically be added there in the way that used to be called “fans.” So they’ll get updates from your Facebook Page, and your existing fans will show up immediately in the box.
In that case, you want the Like Box. Adding the Like Box is almost exactly like adding the like button, but it has a few more options. Just go to the Like Box page to get the code instead of the Like Button page above. In the end, this is what I decided to do, so that’s what you’ll see in my current sidebar.
Putting It In Place
Next, it’s a trip to the widgets page. This is located within your blog at wp-admin/widgets.php and can be found in the side navigation under “Appearance.” Drag the “Text” widget from the “Available Widgets” over to the spot on the Sidebar where you want it to appear. A box will pop open for the text you want included. Choose a name for the box and paste in the code from Facebook.
And Finally…
Now there’s just one step left. In order for the XFMBL code to work, you need to pull Facebook’s javascript onto your pages. You do this by adding a big chunk of code known as the Facebook JavaScript SDK. (Click that link to get the code).
The javascript command may take some time to load, so I recommend putting it in the footer of your site. That way the rest of your page will load without waiting for the Facebook SDK. To edit your blog’s footer file, go to the Editor under “Appearance.” ( /wp-admin/theme-editor.php ). From there, select the Footer (footer.php) from your theme files.
Now paste the Facebook JavaScript SDK code into your footer just before the
tag, so it will be the last thing to load on every page.
Just hit the “Update” button to save the changes to the footer, and you should now see the Like button showing up on your blog’s sidebar!
One of Facebook’s most polarizing features is the wide variety of time-killing applications. If you’ve visited the site lately, you’ve doubtless seen a number of items in your News Feed updating you on your friends’ progress in Farmville, Mafia Wars, and many others.
Did you know it’s easy to remove these updates from your timeline, without disconnecting from your friends? Just find one of these posts and click the “Hide” link that appears on the right when you mouse over it.
Facebook will then ask you if you want to hide the person or the application. Click the name of the game.
Success! You’ll now no longer see updates on the games your friends are playing on Facebook, and you’ll see more links, photos and status updates instead.
Update: It gets even better. (Thanks to techpp.com) Not only can you keep games and other apps out of your Live Feed, you can also exclude them from your Notifications. When a notification appears in the lower right of your screen, mouse over the upper right corner of the item to see the “X” appear. Click that, and you’ll be invited to hide all notifications from that application.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done any Flash development. But we’re launching a really important new product so it’s all hands on deck, and I got to put on my ActionScript hat again for a bit.
Fortunately, I still had a computer running Flash8. Macromedia (now Adobe) really wants their developers to keep up with the times, and I never really made the move to AS2.0, let alone 3.0.
The challenge here was to create a sense of urgency to get signed up for the new product introduction. We reached out to people to get on an advance list, and planned to close it in two days’ time. The product itself is called “Double Your Money,” so the design aesthetic has a U.S. currency theme.
I’d done a countdown swf before, but the technical challenge was a lot more sticky than I remembered. First, you want to get the time from the server so you’re not dependent on the user to set his computer’s clock correctly.
loadVariables("gettime.php","");
I skipped that part in the piece you see here so it will continue to work after Saturday.
Next, I set the date of the event to which I’m counting down. My server’s calendar returns 0 as January, so I subtracted one from the month of my event when I entered the date.
Here’s the part I forgot about. Even though I’m getting the time from the server, which is in the time zone I want to use, Flash makes an adjustment anyway, according to the time zone of the user. So I need to find out what time zone the user is in, and back that out.
d = new Date();
offset = d.getTimezoneOffset();
This function gives the offset in minutes and I need seconds offset_secs = offset * 60
My countdown is on central time, which is 6 hours (2160 seconds) offset from GMT offset_cst = 2160;
offset_secs = offset_secs - offset_cst;
Here’s where I get the difference between the server time and my event date, and add back in the timezone offset. secs = (eventNumber - time)+offset_secs;
Once that’s done, I’m ready to calculate how many hours, minutes and seconds are left. mins = Math.floor(secs/60);
hours = Math.floor(mins/60);
Now my minutes and seconds are the entire time expressed in those units. To make a countdown clock that makes sense, I’ll take out all the minutes that are accounted for in the hours, and all the seconds that are accounted for in the minutes. minsLeft = mins - (hours*60);
secsLeft = secs - (mins*60);
With three dynamic text boxes on the stage to show hours, minsLeft and secsLeft, I was free to design the rest of the clock around that.
Incidently, time is running out if you’re interested in our “Double Your Money” product. You can get more information here: Double Your Money from Zacks.
Here’s a 5 minute tutorial on saving advanced search criteria in Google into a javascript bookmark. So you can select any text on any web page and run a search on that text using your advanced criteria.
I use it to track what my competitors are saying about any topic I run into.
