Blog
How to Use the New Facebook Timeline for Your Fan Page
Facebook is a beautiful place to promote your business. Unless you don’t like change or loss of control; in that case, you’re in trouble. Once again Facebook has changed, affecting fan pages for brands, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and other organizations. The new Timeline format is designed to showcase your fan page in a visually appealing way, giving you more images to customize to represent yourself and your brand. More than that, it can even show historical information! See the Subway page for a great example of how to use the new Timeline features… you can select entries in the timeline from as far back as the 1960s. I couldn’t phrase the...
Read MoreExclude a Page From Search
In some themes, you may have special pages or posts that only appear in a particular location in the theme—perhaps a blurb on the home page, for example. You may be surprised to see this page appear when people search the posts of your site! There are two main ways to hide specific posts from searches: you can modify the PHP code for your theme, or use a plugin. Write Code to Remove Pages From Search Results WPMods has an excellent tutorial on excluding posts and pages from search. You can see the full explanation on their site, but I’ll copy and paste the relevant code here for those who are comfortable customizing PHP code. Why hard-code it instead of...
Read MoreWhy the Password for your Email is Most Important
When you think of possible computer security issues, what login (username and password combination) do you think is most important to protect? (Of course, you should never be careless with any login.) You might think it’s your Windows password for your computer. True, if your username is “user” and your password is “password1” then you have problems. The fact is, though, any geek with a couple minutes to spare can easily get into your Windows account as long as they have physical access to your computer. They’d just need to Google it and follow the instructions. What about a login for your website? Perhaps your WordPress username and...
Read MoreThe Problem with GreenGeeks
When I earlier posted about GreenGeeks vs HostGator, I largely went by information that could be easily found on their websites. Now I’ve actually had some personal experience. One of the reasons I went with GreenGeeks was in the hope of greater server uptime. I was soon disappointed. In a month’s time there were a handful of outages. Whenever I happened to notice these, I spoke to GreenGeeks technical support and they assured me it was a one-time occurrence, a problem that should never happen again… yet there seemed to be an awful lot of one-time issues. The real problem came towards the end of the month; I wanted to try them for a month to test out...
Read MoreFacebook cuts off the edges of my thumbnail images!
If you look at your Facebook fan page, odds are you’ll see five photos—the five that you most recently added or that your fan page was most recently tagged in—in a photo strip across the top of the page. The image, above, of Oreo’s use of the photo strip is from the excellent article 35 Creative Facebook Fan Page Photo Strips. There are, as you might guess, 34 other great examples there of how brands are making use of those images. Most fan pages are not effectively using this, however. Honestly, it can be a bit tricky. First, your photo strip thumbnails are in random order. On a personal profile you have some control over the order of the...
Read MoreCan’t Invite Friends List to Facebook Page or Event?
Facebook doesn’t want you to sent out thousands of unwanted invites to your friends. They really, really don’t want you to. So over time they continue to alter the way certain functionality works. When you invite people to a Facebook fan page or an event, for example, the “select all” button is gone, leaving you to click them one by one. Instead of showing you all your friends by default, they show ones you have recently interacted with (supposedly). Then you have a drop-down to choose from. The contents of that drop-down are: Recent Interactions Search All Friends Some of the cities your friends are in Your universities Some of the Facebook...
Read More