Blog

Thoughts, articles and tutorials about web and design.

Facebook

graph-search

Facebook’s New Graph Search Wants to Put People in Control of Search

Facebook today at an event, unveiled their new Graph Search which essentially wants to pick up the battle with Google over search. As everyone is well aware of by now, finding things on Facebook isn’t exactly easy. You can try using their search box, but it is unlikely that it is going to get you very far.

Facebook’s new Graph Search aims to change that completely, and is Facebook’s way of saying that people and social connections ultimately matter much more than algorithms, or to put it in another way, that you should now stay within Facebook when searching too.

Read More »

facebook-wordpress

Facebook Releases Official WordPress Plugin

In an interesting move, it seems like Facebook has released an official WordPress plugin to support sharing from your WordPress blog right into your Facebook page via their OpenGraph protocol.

So far I haven’t had a chance to check out the new plugin as I just saw the release notes. You will be able to publish to people’s timelines by tagging them in your post as well as directly integrate Facebook comments and the like send and subscribe buttons on each post. You also get a few widgets for your sidebar too.

Check out the plugin and the notes over at Facebook’s developer site.

Adding the Open Graph Protocol to Your WordPress Theme

Earlier this week I showed you how to add the Open Graph Protocol tags from Facebook to your website and took you through how the different tags work. At the end of the article, I promised a follow-up article on how to add these tags to WordPress, as it involves using the proper template tags. So in this article, I will show you just that: How do add the Open Graph protocol tags to your WordPress theme.

If you are unfamiliar with the Open Graph Protocol, I encourage you to go back and read my earlier post about it.

Did you came here just to grab the code? Skip the article and go right to the bottom! Read More »

Add Facebook Preview Image, Title and Description with the Open Graph Protocol

Have you ever shared a link on Facebook only to discover that the preview image you want isn’t available to choose from? If you’re a WordPress user, have you not wanted that featured image to be the preview image on Facebook. Or, do you just want to limit other people from sharing your links with the “wrong” image?

What you might not be aware of is that Facebook easily allows you to do this using their Open Graph tags that you can embed on your page. In this article I will explain how to include them and what each tag does. Read More »

Design Resource: Facebook Fan Page GUI PSD

I found this last week over on Smashing Magazine. They have a freebie design resource called the Facebook Fan Page GUI PSD. Basically, it is a layered Photoshop document containing all the Facebook user interface elements that makes it easy for you to design graphics for either Facebook walls or tabs.

What makes this helpful is that you get to design your graphic while seeing right away how it looks on Facebook’s design. What’s more, they are promising that with every change to the Facebook UI, this file will be reproduced 24 hours later.