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Facebook is infamous for choosing what content its users want to see for them. But while you might be familiar with this process on your News Feed, did you also know that some of your Facebook Messages are hidden from you and do not show up in your notifications? Some of these messages might be …more
(Yes, I know I have already used the Dr. Strangelove subtitle joke on a previous blog but Kubrick is worthy of repeat allusions.) We have been using 37signal’s Basecamp for years now but I have not recognized its brilliance until recently. There are plenty of other reviews and recommendations of Basecamp out there, so I just wanted to throw …more
This week Twitter-Celebrity Ashton Kutcher, who previous to this incident seemed to be quite the social media savant, put his foot in his mouth when he tweeted his support of now-defamed Penn State football coach, Joe Paternio. In case you have been living on Mars, under a rock, with your fingers in your ears, Penn …more
Schema.org is the consortium formed between Google, Yahoo!, Bing to establish markup standards that can enable their search engines to understand the content of your website. The Schema.org vocabulary uses simple HTML tags such as: <div itemscope itemtype =”http://schema.org/Movie”> <h1 itemprop=”name”>Avatar</h1> <div itemprop=”director” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Person”> Director: <span itemprop=”name”>James Cameron</span> (born <span itemprop=”birthDate”>August 16, 1954)</span> </div> <span itemprop=”genre”>Science fiction</span> <a …more
Website load times have many factors, most of which can be cumbersome if not expensive to optimize. One way you can substantially speed-up your website using WordPress is to use a plugin that stores caches of your site so that your server does not have to process the PHP every time you load the home …more
With Halloween coming up this weekend, we have been brainstorming some of the best Social Media Halloween Costumes. Your Facebook Wall: A friend of mine did this last year. Add a blank section below your picture and bring a Sharpie to allow friends to write on your “wall”. And this year why not design it …more
Emails can open your browser, open a PDF, or start a new email message, but what about phone calling. More and more users are using their smartphones as their primary email client. There are also a number of businesses that might utilize an email newsletter to communicate with their customers but use phone as their …more
Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol allows developers to control how the content of their site is shared when a user “likes” or otherwise shares a link to their site on Facebook. When a visitor to your page shares a link or likes a page, Facebook recognizes this link and displays an image, hyperlink, and content from the …more
If you haven’t updated your Facebook Profile to the new Timeline view, I highly recommend it and Jonathan Morris did an excellent write-up for how to update to the new Facebook Timeline now. Another feature that has been added with the advent of the Timeline is Auto-Sharing. Now instead of only “Liked” pages or links showing up …more
Starting October 1st, Facebook will require all apps to be hosted with valid SSL certificates and will only acknowledge requests to their API using OAuth 2.0. These additional security measures are the most recent stage of Facebook’s security overhaul in response to some of the publicized breaches especially the Firesheep debacle. In October 2010, a Firefox plugin …more
Today is Social Good Day, a day to celebrate those people and organizations who are using social media networks for greater causes. Good Days from Chronic Disease Fund is one of those organizations. Many people with chronic disease like Multiple Sclerosis, Crohn’s Disease, and many forms of cancer are unable to afford the required medicines necessary to …more
Using images in blogging or email marketing is essential. However, finding images for use on the web can be difficult if not expensive especially for commercial use in a marketing agency. There is always the option to pay-to-play by using stock images. However, there is another free (and yes, legal) alternative. The website compfight.com allows …more
In social marketing management, you might easily have to organize passwords company wide for dozens if not hundreds of accounts. For decades, we have been warned about password security, and rightly so. We did a two-part series on corporate password security earlier this year. In part two, I detailed a way to create a near-impossible …more
As an interactive marketing agency, we have discovered many Open Source Software packages that can be very helpful for developing interactive marketing campaigns. You might think of open source as simply free solutions to alternatively expensive software packages. While this can be true open source software can also be better software as a result of more …more
Instead of focusing on what you should do in email marketing management as we have in the past, today we will be looking at things to avoid. Don’t over do it – I know this is surprising coming from a email marketing agency, but you can send too many emails. Communication with your customers or …more
One of the great features of WordPress that is useful for any social media management is the ability to limit content to only some people. For many reasons, you might choose to produce some content that you freely give to any visitors of your blog or website but choose to reserve other content just for …more
Last week we looked at the advantages of Panic’s Coda as a text editor. However I neglected to point out my favorite feature of Coda, which has changed the way I code. Zen Coding is a plugin that is a fork of the now defunct TEA for Coda project. The Zen Coding plugin is now available on …more
Over the years I have used many coding applications on PC and Mac. Notepad++, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Smultron, and many others have made appearances in my coding workflow. But I have never been as pleased with a coding application as I am with Coda. Unfortunately for Windows users, Coda is a OS X only application. However …more
HTML Email code can be limiting in many respects. One common web design tool that becomes more difficult with HTML Email is Drop Shadows. Sure you can save fixed-sized images with drop shadows but that will not help if you are building for a template that needs to resized dynamically and the drop shadows with …more
Designing HTML email commonly means going back to the Stone Age (read: the 1990s) when it comes to your code. Designers and Developers are forced to use tables instead of layers and inline styles instead of Style Sheets. Fortunately, email clients are slowly catching up, supporting more CSS properties every year. CSS3 selectors like text-shadow …more
Fortunately, we are not going to look into how sausage (or laws) are made. Instead we will be looking at the origins of the term “SPAM” to refer to unsolicited bulk email messages. The first SPAM is identified as being sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer for DEC Microcomputers. In 1978, he sent a message …more
For years, typography in web development was severely limited by preinstalled fonts on the major operating systems. Basically, web developers were limited to a handful of fonts to use in any website because you could never be assured that a visitor to your site would have any of the fonts you wanted to use. There …more
If there is one thing that irks Facebook Developers more than anything it is the dreaded interior scrollbars. Facebook has limited Apps to a 520px width and a height of somewhere around 800px (actually 758px to be safe). There are two options for displaying your app, auto-resize, or add scrollbars inside of the ads on …more
Facebook provides some really great functionality features with its Javascript SDK (Software Development Kit). For instance, next week we will look at how you can overcome the Facebook iframe height limitation (normally about 800px) by using some Javascript. However in order to use any of these cool features, you need to load the Javascript SDK …more
It was only a year ago the Facebook launched the now prolific ‘Like’ Button. The landscape of the Internet has been forever changed. The integration of the ‘Like’ button has added a deeper level of interaction and relevance to the way we can shop or keep up with the latest news. This week Facebook announced …more
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