share buttons

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: August 14th, 2010 | 0 Comments

On Thursday night / Friday morning I saw that Twitter had released their official retweet button for websites / blogs, and I thought that it would be a good time for me to finally add the links to my own blog. I spent a while adding the official twitter button onto my blog and it was working perfectly, but only on each blog post's own individual page. I wanted to get it to work on my homepage of my blog where you can see my three latest blog posts, I know this can be done because many plugins allow you to do that. After a while I just gave up with trying to get the official twitter button to work and decided to go with the plugin called topsy, this plugin has a lot of setting that let you customize how it will look on your blog including being able to change the colour of it to suit your blog. I went with the colour blue as I decided that while adding in the twitter button I might as well add in the Facebook like button which everyone seems to be implementing on their sites. The facebook plugin I used is called Facebook Like Button (Very creative name!). The problem I ran into with having the two plugins (topsy and facebook like button) enabled was that when you chose to have them both before your blog post they would go onto two separate lines, after a while of playing around with the plugins I noticed that to align them they were both being floated to the left, this is right but when both plugins want to float to the same place, they make a compromise and create two lines. To solve this I simply found out the width of the twitter button I was using and then went into the style-sheet of the facebook plugin and gave it a margin-left with the width of the twitter button and then an extra 15px, to leave a gap between the two! Problem solved and now I have both social network buttons working throughout my entire blog, so if you see something you like, be sure to comment, retweet or like it!

Bebo, will it shut down?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 7th, 2010 | 1 Comments

AOL are now beginning to see that the investment they made into the social network, Bebo, was a big mistake. So much now that they are either going to shut the site down or look for a new buyer, but it will be unlikely that they will make a profit if they sell it.

Two years ago AOL bought Bebo for 850 million dollars! A lot of money, but back then Bebo was the number one social network in Ireland and the UK. Since then though it seems like Bebo remained pretty static, not a lot changed and it soon became more of a social network for young teens. Having such a younger audience does not always appeal to advertisers because they are less likely to make money from their advertisements.

Other social networks such as Facebook suddenly took over in the past year and with a lot of people signing up to use Facebook they just lost interest in Bebo.

I don't use Bebo anymore, I might log in once every so often but I do not actually use it for talking to friends. Here is a little graph of recent stats for various social networking sites, you can see the decline in Bebo over the past year, almost a 50% drop in unique visits!

I do think that it would be unfortunate to see bebo close, i think that with the right owner it could be turned around but it would require a lot of work. It should be more slimmed down, the content is just too bulky on the site, all other sites seem to be going with the trend of slimming down there sites. Facebook has a nice plain and simple look to it and so too does YouTube, with it's recent upgrade of it's video page it is even more simplistic!

There is however always new and better services coming out and if the current sites do not keep with the times then they are bound to fizzle out like Bebo, when Twitter was launched, Facebook brought out a new, what's on your mind feature, which is the same as what twitter has, by adding this feature Facebook managed to keep their members. Bebo did bring out a new feature like this but it was too late and also it didnt incorporate into the site as well as it did with Facebook.

For Bebo to add that feature they had to make a new "Home" section to their site where you could see recent changes and the new status changes of users (the twitter-like feature).

For now Bebo is still here, by the end of next month (May 2010) we will see if it will close down or be sold as that is when the company's strategic evaluation will end.

Gravatar – Do You Have One?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 26th, 2009 | 0 Comments

On many sites nowadays, especially on blogs, whenever you leave a comment a little picture will display in a small square beside your comment. This is known as a gravatar.

A gravatar is a little picture that represents you on the web. It is a simple picture that you can choose to show who you are. It is similar to if you are on a social networking site such as twitter, you will have a profile picture to show who you are.

The way a gravatar works is very simple, you simply go to the Gravatar website here, and then click on sign up. All they ask for is your e-mail address!

So why do they only ask for your e-mail address? Basically that is the only thing they need to have your image follow you on the web. So how does it work? Whenever you are on a site that has the gravatar feature on it, such as this site :D ,  when you leave a comment, it will ask for your e-mail address. By entering your e-mail address into that comment box it then checks to see if you are a gravatar member and if you are it will pull down your image that you chose and then display it next to your comment.

It is really simple and it will give a more personal touch to your comment. On some sites if you do not have a gravatar it just shows the gravatar logo, on my blog here if you do not have your own gravatar, a little cartoon character will show :D .

So go on, get yourself a Gravatar!