Sunday, February 27, 2011

Facebook Optimization. I love having my site show up in Facebook’s search engine! http://amplify.com/u/brya5

Facebook Optimization. I love having my site show up in Facebook’s search engine!

Amplify’d from waynehatter.com

Tips And Tricks

Wouldn’t love to have facebook find your site or blog in their search engine. So that when someone types in certain keywords ‘Your’ site will populate the search results, with an Active link to your blog. Think I am kidding? Ok, over to facebook and type in the name wayne hatter and you will see the website (note to self: make video tutorial).

Now, wasn’t that cool?

Here are the instructions for optimizing your WordPress Blog (or any site for that matter), for Facebook.

1. Copy all of this code:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”Wayne Hatter, WordPress Instructor and more…”/>

<meta property=”og:type” content=”website”/>

<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://waynehatter.com/>

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/173818_1030383642_1442111_n.jpg”/>

<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Wayne Hatter, WordPress Instructor and more…”/>

<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”USER_ID”/> [(go to graph.facebook.com/your_profile or page_ID) to get your id.]

<meta property=”og:description”

content=”Praise be to God! Wayne Hatter is a WordPress Instructor who has taught

100′s of pieople all over the globe on how to use wordpress.

This site covers several areas of WordPress, but does not stop there.

You will learn different fundamentals that are brought to you with an

urban feel. This theme is proudly powered by Empowered Themes”/>

2. Delete what is in red

3. paste what you copied in the first step (minus what you deleted in step 2), in between the <head>……</head> tags

4. Go and have a cup of tea!

Read more at waynehatter.com
 

Saturday, February 26, 2011

New System For Facebook Wall Posts – How It Works

Amplify’d from blog.involver.com

Among the many changes to Facebook Fan Pages is the removal of chronological order as the default setting for Wall posts. What does it mean? Is there any wisdom to it? Are there advantages?

As with many Facebook changes, people are still catching up, and many who were satisfied with things as they were are upset with the removal of a system that seemed to make intuitive sense. Obviously, not every change Facebook makes is right. And if this one proves unfeasible it won’t be the first time Facebook has tried something then made adjustments to accommodate users. However, as most recent Facebook changes have been successful and clearly their intentions with this change were to improve the experience for users, it’s important to understand how it works first and explore the ways that it could actually be an improvement.

In a recent response to questions about the removal of chronological order on their developer forum, Facebook described the new system as “an algorithm determining popular and interesting content. Factors include how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g., photo, video, or status update).”

Their use of the term algorithm brings to mind Google’s system for aggregating search content, and is perhaps an indication of where Facebook wants to go with this. Chronology clearly still plays a role, particularly for users visiting other Fan Page walls, where posts often still appear in a form very close to reverse chronology, with the occasional exception.

Options For Visitors & Page Admins

With so many different variables, it can be hard for users to understand how the logic works. This can be especially difficult for brands. Without accurate and timely notifications on posts, page moderation is INCREDIBLY difficult and cumbersome. While Facebook does provide email notifications to page admins when users post or comment, a more sophisticated way to manage a high volume of posts across multiple Fan Pages is to employ a tool such as Involver’s Audience Management Platform, which allows you to respond chronologically to comments/posts regardless their position on the Wall.

When using Facebook as your Page, there is still a way to toggle back to reverse chronological order. From your Home page, choose between Top News and Most Recent (see below).

The other new feature to Facebook Wall posts is the ability to choose between Everyone and Posts by Page, which means that as a visitor you can view only posts made by the Page admins, or from Everyone posting to this Wall (see below).

Admins can limit the ability of visitors to see other postings by choosing Only Posts By Page in their Wall Tab Shows under Manage Permissions, where they can also set filters for comments, media, age and profanity.

To change the settings for your Facebook Fan Page Wall, go to Manage Permissions:

  • For admins using Facebook as individuals, find this by clicking the Edit Page box that appears on the top right of your Fan Page
For admins using Facebook as their Page, find this by clicking on the top right of your Profile (not home) Page
  • Click the Edit Page box at the top right
Make sure you’re on the Manage Permissions page (highlighted in gray)
  • Here you’ll find a range of filtering capabilities
Next to Wall Tab Shows, choose between Everyone, and Only Posts By Page



Hopefully soon, Facebook will make it simple to access a complete range of view-by options as easily as we do on our desktops, windows or email programs. And while it’s difficult to understand and even more complicated to navigate this new system, think of this as a step in the right direction.



Using involver apps on your Facebook Page is easy, click here to install a free application in less than 60 seconds.


Read more at blog.involver.com
 

Friday, February 25, 2011

Facebook Suggest To Friends Feature Not Working

Amplify’d from fbfanshop.com

As you all probably know facebook is going through the process of a major update to fan pages. For the past week this has rendered the suggest to friends feature unusable (due to server side issue friends are not receiving fan page suggestions).


We have heard that facebook is working on the issue, but the timeframe seems to keep moving daily. We will still be able to meet all the orders you have with us, however there will be a delay until the functionality has been restored.

Read more at fbfanshop.com
 

Adele 21 Album - Ends Sunday 27 - Sponsored Post

Adele 21 Album - Ends Sunday 27 - Sponsored Post
2-Time Grammy winner Adele - Launches new album "21". She is amazing! Listen on iTunes & RT your friends >>

Thursday, February 24, 2011

The 7 Most Important Changes to Facebook Pages

Amplify’d from blog.appbistro.com

The 7 Most Important Changes to Facebook Pages

Today Facebook announced some major changes to Facebook Pages for businesses. We wrote about some of these changes back in December when Facebook accidentally pushed an early version of the new Pages live. Admins will have until March 10 to switch over to the design before they are forced to switch. At Appbistro we know the Pages are a major part of your marketing strategies, so we took an in depth look at the new design, and now present the 7 8 most important changes that will affect you, Page admins.

1. Tabs Are Gone

We talked about this is December, and it’s important to talk about it again now. Facebook has moved tabs to a left column navigation underneath the Page profile photo. This is a move Facebook made because of the low engagement that tabs saw. By moving the navigation to below the Page profile photo, they are hoping more users will interact with 3rd party applications.

2. Photos Are Front and Center

Photos are an important part of Facebook. Facebook is the largest photo sharing site in the world, getting almost 2 billion photos uploaded monthly. Photos are highly engaging and one of the many reasons Facebook is used by so many people. Facebook redesigned user profiles in 2010 to make photos front and center. Facebook’s Rohit Dhawan, the lead product manager for Facebook Pages, told Mashable that at Facebook,  “we strongly believe you should have consistent experiences when possible.” So having a user profile that looks starkly different than Pages goes against Facebook’s philosophy of consistent experiences.

3. Posting Preferences

Facebook has made it easier to post on your Page as yourself, rather than posting as the Page. There is now a setting that allows you to always comment and post on your page as the Page even when using your Facebook user account. You can alternatively turn this feature off, which will allow you to post as your user profile unless you are logged in as the Page. More on that later.

4. E-mail Notifications

Facebook has also introduced a new setting that will allow you to get an email anytime someone posts or comments on your page. This is a big change for Page admins, in the past you had to use 3rd party tools to know when users are posting on your Page. This should make it way easier for admins to keep up with their Pages.

5.  Use Facebook As Your Page

This nifty new feature will allow you to use Facebook as if you were logged in as your Page. This will enable you to get notifications in real time anytime someone interacts with your Page or posts, see a newsfeed of only the Pages you like, Like other Pages and feature them on your Page, and make comments as your page on other pages.

6. Admins Section

Facebook has also introduced a feature that allows you to show who is administering the page to your users. This new box will show in the right column. At the time of this blog post it was unclear if the admins actually displayed to your users or only to other admins.

7. Everyone Filter on the Wall

Another update Facebook is adding is an “Everyone” filter. This brings brings the most engaging posts from a page’s community to the top of the feed. This makes it easier for users and admins to easily find the most “liked” and commented conversations on a particular page. The new Facebook Pages are also smart enough to filter out posts that are not in a language you speak.

Update:

8. FBML is Gone March 11, 2011

Facebook just announced on their developer blog that you will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app to your Pages as of March 11, 2010. From their blog:

On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible.

Read more at blog.appbistro.com
 

Appbistro and Lujure Partner to Offer the First Static FBML to iFrame App Converter!

Amplify’d from blog.appbistro.com

Appbistro and Lujure Partner to Offer the First Static FBML to iFrame App Converter!

Today we are excited to announce our partnership with Lujure: Assembly Line, the first Facebook Page building platform to offer a Static FBML to iFrame application converter!

Lujure is a new and fun way to build custom Facebook Fan Page applications using a simple drag-n-drop editor. Thanks to founder Nathan Latka, Facebook Page owners can now build applications without the need to know any code! This is a very innovative and widely needed service that will change the face of Facebook applications.

How the Platform Works

Once you’ve signed up, you are given a blank canvass to start building your application. Choose from a total of 17 different widgets, many of which include images, videos, twitter streams, Facebook Comments and Facebook Shares. The genius of Lujure comes through it’s drag-n-drop editor. Place and resize widgets with ease, while all the scary code is automatically generated in the back-end.

The converter works by simply pasting in the HTML/FBML from Static FBML and the converter will automatically convert your FBML tags into XFBML or the HTML equivalent of the FBML.



Since Facebook announced the deprecation of FBML a number of companies have been working tirelessly to create a converter to help Page administrators convert their FBML tabs to iFrame applications. “We had over 19 hackers working 24 hours on the converter. It was really important for us to be first out of the gate with this, ” said Latka.

Ryan Merket, CEO of Appbistro said, “This is what Appbistro is about – helping developers distribute and monetize their applications. Nathan (Latka) is prime example of who we love to work with. A true entrepreneur/hacker who saw a problem and developed a solution in a true ‘hackathon’ kind of way.”

Getting started – Save 20%!

Interested in trying Lujure’s innovative platform? Test out their service and sign up for the free trial now! Also, take advantage of Appbistro’s exclusive 20% coupon which you can receive on the Lujure: Assembly Line application page.

Read more at blog.appbistro.com
 

Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages

Amplify’d from www.facebook.com
Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible. We agree. Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. This will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile.



Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who've created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.





If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

    • A number of celebrities and organizations on Facebook are already using this feature to publish the content on their Facebook Page to Twitter and reach a wider audience. They include Dane Cook, LIVESTRONG, The World Wildlife Fund, and the NBA, WNBA and D-League.



      We are always looking to make it easy for you to use Facebook with your favorite websites and applications. Facebook Connect allows you to bring your Facebook profile with you across the Web. We recently worked with Yahoo to integrate your Facebook experience into Yahoo's new homepage; we've built our own Firefox and iPhone applications in-house; and we built tools to help you bring your content from YouTube, Hulu and other sites into your Facebook profile.



      Twitter was a natural next step to link with Facebook Pages because it is a powerful tool for broadcasting short messages widely.



      I was able to build this new feature from start to finish as a summer engineering intern. Next month I'll head back to school, but I'm excited to see my work here live on through all of the people who now will both share on Facebook and tweet on Twitter right from their Facebook Pages.



      Let us know if there are other websites you'd like to work better with Facebook. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to build it when I return next summer.





      Michael is getting ready to return to Stanford University for his junior year.

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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

BREAKING: Facebook Allows Custom iFrame App Names

Amplify’d from blog.appbistro.com

BREAKING: Facebook Allows Custom iFrame App Names


View Comments by Ryan Merket - Feb 20th, 2011

Nathan Latka over at Lujure / Fan Page Factory just broke the news that Facebook is now allowing Facebook Page owners the ability to customize the name of their tabs and iFrame apps.

This is a huge deal because it will now allow Page owners to label apps more specifically, and Pages who are primarily in languages other than English to customize English labeled tabs into the language of their preference.

Below is a video that Latka put together describing how to make the change to your iFrame apps.

See more at blog.appbistro.com
 

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Adding an iFrame Application to your Facebook Fan Page - 2011

Amplify’d from www.hyperarts.com

Adding an iFrame Application to your Facebook Fan Page - 2011

IMPORTANT: You have to upgrade your Fan Page to the new layout before the below application will work on your Fan Page. Many Pages will see a big banner at the top of their Page announcing the upgrade. If you don't, you can click here to upgrade your Fan Page.

Facebook recently announced that on March 11, 2011, the Static FBML application will no longer be available to be added to Pages and that no new FBML applications can be created after that date.

While Facebook indicates that current Static FBML and FBML tab applications will continue to function for now, they are strongly encouraging everyone to move to using iFrame applications rather than FBML ones.

Over the coming weeks, we will be posting a series of tutorials to help you get started with using iFrame applications on your Fan Page.

iFrames are now supported on Page tabs

Prior to February 10, 2011, Facebook had disallowed iFrames on Page tabs and, although were allowed on Canvas pages, they required a user to click activation text or an image to load the iFramed content.

However, as of February 10 iFrames are allowed on both Page tabs and Canvas pages AND they don't require an activation to load them!

What is an iFrame application?

An iFrame application you allows you to embed an external Web page in your tab on your Facebook page (in the new Page layout, "tabs" are on the left side of your Page, rather than appearing on the top).

The good news is that this Web page, because it's not hosted on Facebook, can use standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript like any other Web page does. Interactions with Facebook content are done using the Facebook Software Development Kits (SDKs) and XFBML tags. (For this tutorial, the Facebook SDK is not required.)

The downside of this approach is that you need to be familiar with those technologies and you will need a Web-accessible server where you upload the files for your application page.

Setting up your server

On your Web server, create a directory for your iFrame application. In this example, we are going to create a new directory on the server called "facebook" and then a subdirectory called "mytestapp". The file path will look something like this in your FTP program:

You will want to put all of your files (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc) in this folder or its subdirectories. If you don't know how to do this, read this FTP tutorial.)

Your HTML file

Remember, in your HTML file you can utilize CSS — and inlining styles with the <style> ... </style> tags works fine with iFramed HTML files — and JavaScript (Do not use FBML or FBJS!).

You'll want to set the main container DIV for your content to 520 pixels wide. Here's a very stripped-down example of your HTML file:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

<head>

<link type="text/css" href="http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/adding-iframe-application-to-facebook-fan-page/style.css" />

<style type="text/css">

body {

width:520px;

margin:0; padding:0; border:0;

}

</style>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;

charset=iso-8859-1" />

</head>

<body>

<div id="container">

<p>This is some HTML content</p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

In the above example, I include both the code for an external stylesheet called with the <link /> tag, as well as inlined styles called with the <style> ... </style> tags, in case you want to do it that way. Either should work fine.

Installing the Facebook Developer Application

The first step in creating an application in Facebok is to install the Facebook Developer application.

To do that, log in to Facebook and then visit the URL http://facebook.com/developers

If this is your first time installed the Developer Application, you will see the Request for Permission dialog show below:

Click the Allow button to proceed.

Creating your iFrame application

Now that you have the Developer App installed, click on the Set up New App button.

Give you application a name, click the Agree bubble and then click the Create App button.

Enter the security phrase and then click Submit.

There are a lot of options you can tweak related to your application. In this post, we are going to focus on the basics needed to get your application up and running.

The "About" Tab: Name your application and set a small and large icon

Give your app a name that is short and descriptive. This name will appear on your list of apps on your developer page.

The icons are quite important, especially the small one now that it's shown in the left-column navigation. So make it eye catching. If you don't create your own icons, you'll get the defaults, as shown below.

The "Facebook Integration" Tab: The really important stuff!

Click on the Facebook Integration tab on the left to get started.

In the Canvas section, enter the URL for the location on your server where you are storing your application files.

Further down on that tab, enter information about your Tab in the Page Tabs section.

  • The Tab Name is what will appear on the sidebar of your Fan Page.  It can be up to 16 characters in width;
  • The Page Tab Type should be set to iFrame;
  • The tab URL is the file name of the file that should be loaded first when the Tab is loaded into your Fan Page.  It will generally be index.html, index.php or something similiar.  Make sure to put something in the field or your tab will not appear on your Fan Page.

Click the Save Changes button.

Installing your iFrame application on your Fan Page

Once your Facebook application has been created, you will need to add it to your Fan Page.  To do that, click on the Application Profile Page link on the right side of your application page.

Now click the Add to My Page link on the left.

A dialog overlay will open and will show any pages that you are an Admin on.

Find the page that you want to add the Tab to and click the Add to Page button.

Your new iFrame app should now appear on your Fan Page.  If you don't see it there right away, you may need to adjust your Page settings.   From your Fan Page, click on the Edit Page link.  Then click on Apps and find the application that you just added.  Click on the Edit Settings link next to the app and Add link.

Troubleshooting

Based on feedback to this post, we are starting to compile some iFrame App Troubleshooting Tips. We will update this section as new questions some up.

Check your URLs!

Make sure that the URL you set for your iFrame is correct. Try accessing it directly, via your browser, instead of via your Page tab. Bad URL addresses are the most common problem. If the URL to the Web page or image you want in your iFrame Page tab is incorrect, obviously the tab won't work.

You can also test the validity of your URL by right-clicking the area where your iFramed content should be and then select "This Frame: Open Frame in new window" or something similar (each browser presents this option a little differently).

Error messages from your server

If your server returns an error when Facebook tries to load the HTML page into the iFrame, you may need to change the file extension from .html to .php or .aspx (depending on the server platform you are using). When Facebook loads the iFrame, they do a POST to the index page in order to pass some data to your application and it looks like some servers are set up to not allow a POST to a file with the .html extension. We will be taking a look at how to access the data that Facebook passes in the next tutorial, but I wanted to mention this now since it caused issues for some people.

Scroll Bars

If your iFrame content causes a horizontal scroll bar to appear, something is causing the width to exceed 520 pixels, which is the maximum that Facebook allows.

We recommend adding some CSS (either inline as shown below or in your separate CSS file) to remove margin, padding, and border from elements by default. Many browsers add spacing around certain elements by default which can cause the scrollbars to appear unexpectedly.

<style type="text/css">

body {

width:520px;

margin:0; padding:0; border:0;

}

</style>


Next Steps

If you are famaliar with HTML and CSS, you can begin building your tab page content right away. In future tutorials, we will be looking at adding interactivity to your Tab using the PHP SDK and XFBML tags.

Up next: Creating a Reveal Tab on an Facebook iFrame application using the PHP SDK

We would love to hear what you would like to see in this series -- If you would like to know how to do something specific using iFrame applications, just note it in the comments and we will see what we can do.

Read more at www.hyperarts.com