Open the index.php file for your theme in a HTML editor and look for a line similar to this:

<?php comments_popup_link(’0 Comments’, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments ‘); ?>

Change this to:

<?php comments_popup_link(”, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments ‘); ?>

You’re just deleting any text that should be displayed when there are no comments so if there are none, then nothing will be shown. Geddit!?

You might need to edit this line in several other template files also such as Archive.php, Category.php, Search.php, Tag.php and anywhere else comment numbers are displayed.

Leon.

Live September 2010 – www.OrlaSloyan.ie & www.OrlaSloyanPhotography.com

After some Google research, I came upon an excellent and mostly free form building site called JotForm.com which presents you with an easy to use WYSIWYG form builder with all the options you could ever need. The most important option I found at the end was that you can generate Facebook specific FBML code that is guaranteed to work in your FBML app tab. Jotform doesn’t stick it’s logos all over your form, in fact, there’s no clue it’s there at all through the whole process. It also redirects any data entered to an email address of your choice.

I tried it and here are the results after very little time messing around:

www.facebook.com/ReverbStudiosDesign?v=app_4949752878

I then got to wondering if it was possible to Email pics to Dropbox and found a few sites/apps that can do it well. This one seemed best – SendToDropbox.com.

So, armed with the above knowledge, here’s what I done:

Contact Form 7

This is one of the most popular FREE form plugins for wordpress and the current version includes the ability to add File Upload fields to a form. As many as you want. I setup a new form with standard questions like Name, Email, etc..and included a few upload file fields with specifications as to File Type, File Size, etc.. I then pasted in the automatically generated email address from SendToDropbox.com in the “To” field. Contact Form 7 also has the option to send the results of the form submission to a second email address and I setup a duplicate of the first email to go to the proper contact email address of the website, minus the file attachments, just so the website admin would get notification of newly uploaded files. Of course, the Dropbox PC software also alerts you straight away when new files are added to your folder. See below for Contact Form 7 settings:

SendToDropBox.com

This is a simple but cool site that connects to your Dropbox account and provides a custom email address that you can send emails and file attachments to. It also has a copule of extra features that process emails received such as: Automatic Unzipping, Email Content Inclusion and control over Dropbox Folder Names/Trees for emailed files, ie – files uploaded in this way can be added to folders named by Date, Email Address, Subject, etc..handy for keeping thigs organised and finding customers uploaded files! See below:

Result

The end result is a normal looking contact form on the customers site that allows basic personal info to be uploaded to Dropbox along with files and photos. The website admin gets instant notification of new files added to his Dropbox account as well as email notifaction of the customer’s details. Nice!

Of course, it can be even simpler. If you just add an email address to the site like Upload@SiteName.com and have that forward on to the custom SendToDropbox email address then people can use the methods they already know for sending emails and attaching files and it will work just as good. I personally think it’s best and more professional to use the form method but perhaps a choice can be given.

Leon.

The trouble with these logos and thumbnails is that while the logo can be 200 x 600, the thumbnail that Facebook auto crops for you can only be 50 x 50 so the chances of the thumbnail not looking exactly as you’d like it are quite high! This thumbnail is all over Facebook if you post a lot so it might be worthwhile making sure it looks decent. You have a small bit of control over the thumbnail content. Once you’ve uploaded your new logo, hover over it and you’ll see a “Change Picture” link. When you click this you’ll see an “Edit Thumbnail” link that allows you to drag and select the best 50 x 50 portion of your logo for use as your thumbnail.

What Johnny pointed out is that if you purposefully design your logo to take the thumnail into account right from the start you can kind of engineer it to look good as a thumbnail. Johnny suggests designing your logo with a 200 x 200 ‘box’ at the top into which you put your main company logo or symbol, which should be smaller than 200 x 200, ie – with white padding around it, possibly about 150 x 150 or 175 x 175. Now when you upload this logo and click “Edit Thumnail”, you should be easily able to select a nice uniform portion for a thumbnail instead of grabbing a bit of text too, etc..

My own logo isn’t really suited to this as it’s not square so this may not work for everyone. Here’s mine and Johnny’s Facebook pages so you can see how we’ve done things:

Facebook.com/ReverbStudiosDesign

Facebook.com/JohnnyBeirneSocialMedia

Some background:

As some of you may know, Facebook have relatively recently rolled out an external “Like” system whereby content outside of the Facebook site itself can have Like buttons. Straight away tons of sites (this one included) added the Like functionality through embedding code manually or using plugins. I have personally used the FB Like WordPress plugin for this blog and find it works well but here’s the manual code for your self-hosted WordPress blog if you prefer. It should be pasted in your “single.php” theme file ideally:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:25px”></iframe>

Check your code:

What I realised is that it makes no difference whether you use the Like or Recommend verb for your button. The important thing is to make sure that you either use the XFBML version of the button code or if using the IFRAME version, make sure to use the “Standard” layout with at least 450px width. Doing it either of these ways ensures that people will be given the option of leaving a comment and it’s this comment that ensures the article link goes on your wall. All is explained in this paragraph from the Facebook manual code link below:

When will users have the option to add a comment to the like?

If you are using the XFBML version of the Like button, user’s will always have the option to add an optional comment to the like. If you are using the Iframe version, users will have the option to add a comment only if you are using the ‘standard’ layout with a width of at least 450 px. If users do add a comment, the story published back to Facebook is given more prominence.

Get manual code:

Here’s the link to get Recommend/Like button code for your site or static page. The link also has some important information about the distinction between Like and Recommend and leaving comments:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

Here’s the manual code again for your self-hosted WordPress site:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:25px”></iframe>

Since Liking/Recommending in this way is akin to ‘Sharing’ and to avoid the ambiguity between Like & Recommend, here’s a link to a decent WordPress Facebook Share plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-on-facebook/

Conclusion:

It has already been proven via stats that bloggers have started to get a lot more traffic after installing Like buttons so make sure you have yours!

PS – Please “Like” this article if for no other reason than to see how it works!

Leon.

Most of the pics I post to Twitpic go out on Facebook too and I get on average about 30 to 40 hits, however a recent upload went totally off the scale! Readers might have heard about the recent controversy involving British Petroleum (BP) when they released a poorly Photoshopped (edited) image to the media depicting a BP monitoring room where workers were keeping an eye on the oil leak. The image was edited to make it look like they were a little busier than they actually were but it wasn’t a great job!

I spotted a link from Wired magazine on Twitter asking for members of the design community to have a go at altering the original BP photo for the laugh and to see if they could do a better job than the botched BP one so I gave it a bash, seeing a good oportunity to get my Photoshop skills some coverage and maybe get some work in considering the Twitpic links to my main Twitter account with all my business info and web links attached!

Here’s the result below depicting some ‘alternative/lighter viewing’ in the BP control room and here’s my Twitpic with stats (currently 17,864 hits):

Live July 2010 – www.MotoringMouth.co.uk

Essentialy I have 2 main sources of content, this Blog and Twitter. It’s rare that I would post content directly in any other network. From my blog, posts go out to all the other networks and indeed Twitter but I also microblog from Twitter directly. Doing things this way, ie – only creating content in 1 or 2 places max but routing that content to multiple different places, is a fantastic and efficient method of having an active precence on the main social networking sites without the hassle of manually going in and creating content on them all individually.

I find using Dlvr.it a great help in routing my content but it relies on your main source having an RSS feed.

I believe these methods or routes are fairly common for most active networkers right now:

Live July 2010 – www.RuthDuignan.ie

Live May 2010 – www.IdealDoors.ie

I regularly leave comments on other forums and blogs and a lot of these sites now have automated systems which email you when someone has responded to a thread that you left a comment in. When the automated system emails you and you have your responder setup, they will get replies everytime they email you. Some comment threads can get very big so that’s a lot of automated emails flying about and you will not be liked by the forum/blog admin. I’d left a comment on this guy’s blog and he had new comment notification turned on for the thread so he got a pile of my auto responders in his inbox every time someone left a new comment!

The upside is that hopefully he will now remember my business name forever!

Here’s a few other reasons not to setup auto responders:

• If spammers know there’s a working email address they’ll spam some more,
• Sites that send out Newsletters don’t want a ton of auto responders back at them,
• No one likes getting a non personal email response.

I believe Auto responders are generally useless these days because very few people will bother to hang around until you get back from your lovely holiday to email you again. They’ll either look for a response from someone else in your company or go elsewhere. If you are a one man band kind of business like I am then you really have to check email all the time and it’s easy to do via smart phone or laptop while you’re away.

I’ve recently added some detection code to my main (Non WordPress) site that basically looks to see which user agent or mobile phone platform my visitors are using and if it’s a non-iPhone phone then they get redirected to my other site ReverbStudios.Mobi, a site I built specifically to render fast and well on most mobile browsers. If they are not on a phone and at a normal PC or Mac then they just get to see the main site ReverbStudios.ie

As far as building an optimised site for mobiles is concerned, here’s my best advice:

• Have very few, if any, Images and Scripts,
• Make any images you really do need to use smaller than 200px wide max,
• Specify the dimensions of all images used,
• Only include basic content such as an outline of services and contact details,
• Use “Callto:” links on any phone numbers you include so people can click the number to initiate a call,
• Add links to your main site or social networking precences for users with smartphones.

I use the  WP-Touch plugin for my WordPress blog to allow Smartphone users to choose either a normal view of the site or a simplified version. The plugin handles detection and design.

Here’s the code I’ve used on my main, static site to detect people’s browsers, it’s courtesy of Richard Shepherd but with a few changes with help from Justin Knecht.

Mobile Detection.txt

Live June 2010 – www.TheMii.ie/Conference/

Live May 2010 – www.LeitrimTours.com

Live July 2010 – www.DurkinMemorials.com

Live May 2010 – www.AnthonyJoyce.ie

There’s a new breed of spam that escapes filters like Akismet and appears to be a bit more real than traditional spam, ie – no mention of viagra or no funny email or web addresses with foreign lettering. They look and read like a manually created comment by a real person and probably are actually created in this way. Typically they take the form of complimentary comments about your content. Here’s one I got today for example:

“I loved this post. Very informative.”

The commenter added this web address – http://articledominance.com/freereport.html which appears to be a get rich quick offer/site asking for your email address and name, possibly to spam you some more!

My basic, common sense advice when you get comment notifications from your blog is to have a quick look at the commenter’s url/website and see if it looks legit. Also see if the commenter’s text is generic or actually relates specifically to something you’ve said in your post. As another general rule of thumb, if the comment doesn’t contribute anything interesting, related or useful to the discussion on your article then I’d delete it.

Here’s a few things, specifically to do with the commenter’s website that I would delete or mark a comment as spam for:

• Overselling something,
• Get rich quick content,
• Asking for signups/email addresses,
• Advert heavy sites,
• Sites with tons of Google adverts,
• Completely unrelated site.

Leon.

What do you do?

Multitasking/Orientation Lock:

To acces the Multitasking screen just press the Home button twice. This brings up a bar at the bottom of the screen which lists your currently running apps. If you swipe all the way to the left you’ll see some cool new iPod controls and the button for locking the screen in either Portrait or Landscape mode. A very handy feature that will prevent unwanted rotations in bed!

Folders:

To create new folders, simply hold down on any app to enter the edit screen and drag an app on top of another one to create a new folder pair. You can then name this new folder and drag more apps into it.

Digital Zoom:

I know digital zoom is kinda silly and low quality but it might come in handy the odd time. To access the new zoom features, tap just above the Take Snapshot button and you’ll see the zoom slider appear.

Hope this helps.

Leon.

The total number of respondents who started the survey was 1,145.  Of these respondents, 829 completed the survey.  This constitutes an overall survey response rate of 72.4%.  However, a quota sample of 376 was determined to be sufficient for the research at hand and so this amount was utilised for the research based on the judgement of the researcher as,

In quota sampling researcher judgement is used in establishing the categories and choosing the sample from the categories

(Wrenn et al., 2002, p.167).

Findings from the survey highlight the following key statistics:

Overall:

• 73% of respondents use SNSs to connect with current friends, 65% to connect with old friends and 28% to make new friends.
• 67% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the SNS they were most active on had become an important method of communication for them.
• Facebook is the SNS that respondents had been most active on in the last 30 days (53%)
• 30% of respondents had over 200 friends on their most active SNS, 25% between 100 and 199 friends, 20% between 50 and 99 friends, with 25% detailing they had less than 50 friends on their most active SNS.
• 84% of respondents have joined a group on a SNS.
• 51% of respondents have visited a company profile page on a SNS.
• 26% of respondents have completely public profiles on their most active SNS.
• 22% of respondents have had a negative experience on their SNS, which include viruses, unwanted friend requests, spam, online predators and bullying.

Product and Marketing Findings:

• 17% of respondents make comments to friends about products on SNSs.
• 37% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they would make comments to their friends on the SNSs about products if that product was of interest to them.
• 52% of respondents outlined that when a person is a close friend offline, they are influential on a SNS, 40.7% highlighted that they are influential when they are members of their family.
• 51% of respondents explained that they would discuss products with friends on a SNS to provide friends with product information relevant to them and 41% to voice their opinion.
• 40% of respondents have clicked on an advertisement on a SNS.
• 24% of respondents with agreed or strongly agreed that SNSs have become over-commercialised.
• 57% of respondents highlighted that they notice advertisements on SNSs but 53% detailed that they do not like the presence of advertisements on their SNS.  Furthermore 43% of respondents noted that they do not trust advertisements on SNSs.

Many thanks to all those who took part in the survey.  It is greatly appreciated and contributed significantly to my research.

Sarah Diffley

If you would like to contact Sarah in relation to these survey results, please leave a comment.

Leon.

• Make sure your hsoting server is decent/fast.
• Build your site with CSS/DIV’s rather than with Tables.
• Be efficient, tidy and semantic with your HTML and CSS code.
• Validate your code.
• Compress all images as much as possible.
• Avoid Flash/Video/Audio files embedded on the home page.
• Don’t use to0 many unnecessary fancy scripts or widgets just to show off, eg – Facebook, Live Chat, Google Gadgets, etc…
• Merge your external CSS files into one (the less external file calling the better).
• Merge your scripts files into one (as above).
• Place script calls at the footer of your page so they load last – WordPress Plugin.

Compressing via Gzip:

I’ve just done this belatedly for both my main static site and my WordPress blog. To turn on Gzip for a static PHP page for example, I’ve used this code:

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], ‘gzip’)) ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”); else ob_start(); ?>

Your server and the visitors browser both need to support compression for the above command to work. Test whether your site is compressed or not here:

www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

For my wordpress blog I’ve used the WP HTTP Compression plugin. There are a few excellent Caching plugins for WordPress such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache which both handle compression too but I found both of them a bit over the top and they played havoc with my auto publishing to Twitter and Facebook.

Try this website page speed tester to see where you’re at now!

www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Leon.

To create an ad in Facebook, login and click “Ads & Pages” in the left menu of the home page.

Create an Ad:

Click “Create an Advert” top right and you’re presented with a simple form/wizard to guide you through the process. You will have a choice of creating an ad from scratch or ‘advertising something you already have on Facebook’ like a Business Page. For a new advert you are asked for a Destination URL, Ad Title, Body Text and Image and as you type you see how the ad will look to others on the right hand side.

Design your Ad:

Be creative with your ad text, title and image, after all you need to catch people’s attention! Facebook doesn’t allow too many capitals or symbols so just say something interesting. The Destination URL is important in that it is where ad viewers will end up after clicking your ad. You need to make sure this page relates to what you have said in the advert and is easy to read and navigate with perhaps a large ‘call to action‘ button or link to get people to buy your product/service or just contact you.

Targeting options:

This is where Facebook advertising is really interesting for me. You can set the ad up to only show to Facebook users in a certain country or even city or group of countries/cities. You can also target people by Age, Gender, Relationship Status, Birthday, Language, Likes & Interests, Education level, Facebook Friends, Fans of a Page/Event/Group, etc.. The cool thig is that as you make these selections, Facebook tells you exactly how many people you are targetting based on your choices so you get to see your ad reach as you go!

Spend:

Finally, choose your ad duration and max daily spend to avoid getting an unexpectedly high bill and choose a cost per click that gives you a realistic chance of your ad being pushed to the top and actually seen. You will be asked whether you want to pay for Impressions or Clicks. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to pay just for the ad to be shown when there’s no guarantee people wil actually look at it. Better instead to just pay for actual clicks surely!?

Analytics:

One of the main benefits in using online advertising channels like Facebook over traditional methods like print and other media is that you will have access to detailed statistics on the performance of your ad. Everything from the number of times your ad was shown to how many times it was clicked on to average cost per click and total spend is available so you can evaluate how effective the campaign was.

Just remember to ask inquirers where they heard about you!

Leon.

Carrick-on-Shannon

9th-11th July 2010

See www.carrickwatermusic.com for a complete listing of events and to book online.  Great gigs in trad, classical, opera, jazz plus ‘fringe’ events in the making.

For WordPress powered sites and blogs there are many great plugins to automatically render a stripped down version of the site but I really wanted my design to be visible. I found out that the iPhone Safari browser automatically resizes elements on a web page including text and background images so to combat this simply add the following to your body tag:

-webkit-background-size: 2000px 1024px; (The exact size of my background image in this case)
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none; (Stops the iPhone from resizing any text on a page)

“webkit” is specific to the Safari browser so adding this code will not mess up anything in other PC based browsers.

You could take this a stage further and try to detect iPhone visitors with the following code and give them an iPhone specific stylesheet and viewport:

This goes in your <head> section:

<!– iPhone Detection –>
<?php
if (ereg(‘iPhone’,$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
$iphone = 1;
}
elseif (ereg(‘iPod’,$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
$iphone = 1;
}
else {
$iphone = 0;
}
?>

<!– If it’s an iPhone, show the Viewport Meta tag and iPhone CSS –>
<?php if ($iphone == ’1′): ?>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320px” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”iphone-style.css” media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)” />

<!– If it’s NOT an iPhone, show the normal CSS and no Viewport Meta tag –>
<?php else: ?>

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”normal-style.css” media=”screen” />

Leon.

I’ve only relatively recently got into the habit of asking enquirers where they found me but I can honestly only account for a very small handful of direct sales from my precence and activity on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, The IIA, etc..

I realize that there are other conversion factors ranging from; my market (whether there still is one or not!?), increased competition,  my website usability and ability to convert enquiries but should all of my efforts to brand myself as a professional, accessible and affordable design service provider not account for a little more return?

Off the top of my head I’d say I probably spend a few hours each day reading posts and engaging on Facebook and Twitter especially. I even check these sites first before email these days! I do get lots of great, free info but inevitably I get drawn into entertaining but ultimitately non business related conversations with people I barely know or people who are never ikely to be clients. Result? Time I could and should be spending actually working or maybe learning something new is possibly wasted.

I think these are things I and lots of other social media marketing exponents are going to have to think hard about and try to accurately measure in the near future as the initial social media furore passes.

Leon

For a start, it has to be mentioned that no website can ever be as well trafficked as the likes of Facebook so it makes sense to be where everybody is. I used to always say this about eBay to people who wanted to sell online, ie – go where the people are buying then try drag them back to your own site.

I’ve heard it said that your own site could never match the technology on Facebook etc but I disagree. Even a freely avaible and simple system like wordpress can emulate live blogging, commenting, video/photo sharing and social functions through the likes of Buddypress and various other plugins and templates. There’s also plugins to show Facebook Like buttons and Badges on your site and to export your site news or blog directly to Facebook and Twitter automatically so good connections can be made between Facebook and your own web precence.

I find a lot of my recent clients are aware of the fact that their own sites can be made communicate with Social Media sites and they specifically request this functionality when enquiring. I’ve not had any drop their sites or go with a Facebook page only yet.

Another important consideration is that while Facebook may be king of the hill at the minute, that may not always be the case. Who is to say in 3 years time that it won’t be shut down (possibly over privacy issues!?) or introduce fees or just succomb to a new site on the block. What happens to all your data and customer interaction in this case?

Also, with your own site you will always have full control over the likes of design, content and privacy, choosing exactly how you want it to work for you. As of now, there are no easy ways to capture specific customer data or sell products from Facebook but this is easy to do on your own site through forms and carts, etc..

The old online branding advice of avoiding the usage of freely available email addresses like @eircom.net or @yahoo.ie in favour of a professional business address like @your-company.com also applies in that people may think less of you for only bothering to have a freely available Facebook page rather than a professional custom web precence.

In short I think the way forward is to connect people’s sites with their business precence on the social media portals and not just decide on one or the other. At this point, as a web designer, I’m not too worried.

Leon.

Here’s how to do it:

With a recent version of standalone WordPress and the NextGen Gallery plugin both installed and activated and using a HTML editor like Dreamweaver, try to locate the lines/div’s in your WordPress template’s Header.php file or Stylesheet that control the template’s banner image sizing and position. Inside this div replace the existing image code with the following NextGen php hard code and upload to the server:

<?php echo do_shortcode(‘[Gallery not found]‘); ?>

Replace “Gallery not found” with slideshow id=x where ‘x‘ is the ID of the gallery/slideshow you wish to display.

This gallery should be created beforehand using images that match precisely the dimensions of the template’s existing banner image.

Next, go to the NextGen options in wordpress and specify slideshow dimensions that match the width and height of the template banner image. You can specify other options here such as order, image display time, next/previous controls, etc..

That’s it! Refresh your front end and hopefully you now have a flash banner!

Here’s an example of it working – www.Gaelink.ie

Leon.