Thepipbuzz

This article describes making a Facebook badge to promote your page, and putting it onto your blog. What is a Facebook page This article is about how to make a badge to promote a Facebook  Page . This is an example of the "follow me" approach to linking your blog and the social networks , although for Facebook pages your reader becomes a Fan rather than a Friend. Many people are confused about when they should use each of the types of "thing" in Facebook, ie Profiles - accounts for flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, individual people Pages - for websites, brands, and organisations that don't want to approve all their Facebook members Groups -  for organisations that want to approve individual members who join (and in return, group-owners can send private messages to individual members. The most common "thing" for blogs to have is a Page - and a Badge is the tool which Facebook provides to help you to promote a Page on your blog or other website. Ho...

This article shows how to install Twitter Cards into Blogger - and explains why you might do this if Twitter could be an important source of visitors for your blog. What are Twitter Cards Recently, Neil Patel explained why having social sharing tags installed into your blog can be important, and I've written a little more about it specifically for Facebook and Blogger  here . Twitter, for reasons best known to themselves, have developed their own version of social media meta-tags, called "Twitter Cards".    (Apparently they do make some use of Open Graph tags - but not for Twitter cards displays.) Two things happen inside Twitter when someone tweets a message including a link to a website or blog that has Twitter-cards installed.   Firstly, the message has the words "View Summary" under it, instead of just "Expand". Secondly, when someone in Twitter clicks the View Summary link, more information (ie a "Twitter Card") is shown about the cont...

This quick-tip is about Google's new feature for automagically sharing every Blogger post to Google+ This post explains how to do it: (How did I do that? Using Google+'s new embed feature. Do you like it? Should I make more quick-tips like this?) Something I haven't been able to figure out yet is whether this happens for all posts (including edits of existing posts) or just for newly published posts. If it's the former, then getting your posts right before you publish them is probably more important than ever.

This article explains how you can put a Google+ post (your own or someone else's) into your blog or website, provide the post was shared publicly on Google+. Recently, Google+ announced a couple of new features.   One of them, embeddable posts, has a lot of potential for bloggers. Look what s/he said on Google+ Embedding a Google+ post into a blog post is an example of the "look what he/she/I said over there" approach to linking blogs and social-networking sites . It gives people who are reading your blog up-to-date information about how many other people have plus-1'd the linked content, and an easy way to interact with it "over there" themselves - without leaving your blog. Why would you want to do this? The short answer:  Because you want to write about a Google+ post, and give your readers an easy way to +1 it or comment on it without leaving your blog. The long answer:  Because blogs are better than social-networking sites for developing ideas your id...

This article describes Google Friend Connect, and how it can be used at the moment. Google Friend Connect (GFC) was one of Google's earlier social-networking attempts, introduced in 2008. Originally (you can still see the full description here ), GFC promised a range of social features that website-owners, including bloggers, could include on their sites. including: Add GFC features to a website by installing snippets of HTML code onto the site, or or using the  API. Users sign in to your website, using GFC with an existing account (e.g. Google, Yahoo, AOL) Users can create or import profiles (e.g. Twitter), discover other users, and send private messages to each other. Social gadgets, eg for posting comments and links, rating and reviews, that you could add to your site, which your visitor could use once they had logged in with GFC. Website owners can set up questions to be asked when a user used GFC to join their site. The idea was for them to find out their member's intere...

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature. Automatically updating Google + from your blog If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published . The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles. You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (h...