pete's web work

My newest project is a photo-a-day site – to which I added a Facebook Like button, Google + button, and a Tweet button. I ran into some issues with the FB Like button in that it would pull the wrong image every time someone clicked it. I found this great write-up on how to fix it:

How to Add Facebook Open Graph Meta Data in WordPress Themes.

What I like about the solution is that the code is simply added to your functions.php file – so no need to add another plugin. The main fix is to add new Meta tags to the site, but in order for them to update properly some code is necessary (which is in the tutorial above). Good stuff!

Google’s ’+1′ button is the latest button everyone should have on their site. Their latest endeavor is Google Plus – which is slowly uniting all of Google’s social products. It is strongly targeting Facebook –  the ‘+1′ button can be likened to FB’s ‘like’ button. I must admit, I am liking it more than Facebook so far.

However, there is something interesting about the +1 button’s purpose – they are not replacing “buzz”, which is more like Facebook’s “share”.

Buzz buttons are used for starting conversations about interesting web content (“Hey guys, what do you think about this news story?”). +1 buttons recommend web content to people in the context of search results (“Peng +1’d this page”), and +1′s from social connections can help improve the relevance of the results you see in Google Search. You can use the +1 button, or the Buzz button, or both—pick what’s right for your content.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

When you are a business owner, life is always moving.. and managing all of your Social networks can be a little daunting. Fortunately, there are shortcuts to save a little time, such as posting a message to Facebook automatically posting to Twitter. Facebook has a good explanation of how to hook up its Pages with Twitter, surprisingly.  In the explanation:

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 [is] available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

If you want to quickly add some “social” aspects to your website, Twitter and Facebook are obviously the easy ones to start with. While there are many different ways to integrate these services with your site – if you want some quick, clean solutions, think about Widgets and buttons.  Both services provide all you need to the resources to your site.

To get started with a Twitter Widget.. head over to http://twitter.com/widgets/ . Assuming you have a twitter account – you can customize the styling for these flashy little items and grab some code to add to your site. Twitter ‘buttons’ are simpler – simply a “tweet this” kind of option – check those out here.

For Facebook, “Fanboxes” are a nice feature. You first need a “page” for your website or business -assuming that’s in place, head over to http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbox.php … you can make a few edits and grab the code. There are several other options from Facebook, which you can review here. You can also get a Facebook “Like” button – similar to the Twitter button – details here.

More tightly integrated solutions are out there as well – such as allowing users to comment on your site content simply by logging into their Twitter/Facebook accounts, or even pulling your content into your Twitter feed or Facebook page.