Live from the WhippleHill Conference
I’m in Boston today to participate in 2 sessions at the WhippleHill User Conference. At 8:30 am EST, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on social media. The panel will be broadcast live on uStream. You can follow along here.
Later in the morning, I’ll be presenting a session on how to monitor and maintain social media presences. It should be fun – the people I’ve met here so far have been great.
Mostly, I’m just glad to be here after a bad travel day yesterday.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Guest Post on UK Web Focus
One of the areas I’m interested in when it comes to higher ed web development and social media is how these technologies are being used in colleges and universities around the world.
Brian Kelly, who runs UK Web Focus, asked me to blog about how we’re using technologies like Facebook here in the US when it comes to how we market our colleges. You can read my post here.
I hope to learn more about how schools in the UK and Europe use technologies at the Institutional Web Management conference coming up at the end of this month, where I’ll be presenting (though I’m presenting on the cloud and not social media.)
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Amazon adds Cloudfront to their web console
I love Amazon S3. It’s so versatile and can fill a multitude of roles in your web work flow. Need secure backup? Check. Need to create a shared space across multiple computers and locations? Check. Need a place to quickly serve your videos, graphics, CSS, podcasts, javascript and more? Check. One complaint I read about delivering media quickly over S3 was a bit of latency, so Amazon addressed that.
Last year, they announced their Cloudfront product, which is a content delivery network that sits on top of S3. S3 is pretty fast, but Cloudfront, for extra cost, is even faster, especially internationally. I blogged about CloudFront here last year, and have used it for several projects at my institution.
The challenge was getting up and running with Cloudfront. There just wasn’t an easy way, other then API calls or a browser add-on like S3Fox, to designate content that one wanted served from Cloudfront.
As of yesterday, Amazon has added Cloudfront tools to their great management console. Now, you can easily create new Cloudfront distributions and manage them from one central location. It’s a great addition, and one I think will help increase the usage of this nice product.
You can read more about this on Amazon’s Web Services Blog.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
How to add a custom tab to your Facebook fan page
Since I led a webinar this week about Twitter and Facebook usage this week for HigherEdHero, I’ve received a lot of questions from folks wanting to know how we added a custom tab to my institution’s fan page. I thought it’d be a worthwhile blog post to show you how we did it, and to see if there are easier ways to accomplish what we have.
We have a “Welcome” tab on our page with some general campus information. It looks like this:
Here’s how to add a similar tab to your institution’s fan page. Keep in mind you must be an administrator of the page you want to add the tab to.
First, search for the FBML app. You can just enter in FBML in the search box on any page.
You’ll want the application called Static FBML. It will look like this. You can click for a larger size image.
Visit the application’s page, which looks like this. You’ll want to say “Add to my Page.”
When you add it to your page, you can choose what pages or applications you want to add the FBML to. You can add it to multiple pages, but be aware that you can only have 1 FBML application on a page, unfortunatly.
At this point, begin editing your page. Find the FBML area and click on the pencil icon to start editing it.
You’ll be given an area where you can title your box as well as edit the content. In box title, enter what you want the text of your tab to say. Don’t worry if you don’t know FBML, you don’t need to. You can put straight up HTML in here, complete with images and more.
Once you’ve got your content in the box (and don’t worry, you can always edit or add more later), it’s time to add it to your page. Go back to your fan page and click on the plus sign (+), which should be the last tab in the row, like such:
When you click the plus sign, you should see all the applications and content you can add as a tab. One of the choices should be the box name you entered when editing the FBML box. Click on it and it will be added to your page.
Click on the tab and if everything’s gone correctly, you should see the HTML content you entered in. Here’s what I see using the HTML I entered a few screens ago.
There you go – you should now have a brand new tab on your fan page you can add all sorts of neat content to. As I said earlier, as far as I know, you can only have 1 FBML app on a page at a time, thus just one custom tab. If you know a better way to accomplish this, please let me know.
Please see the comment from Mark below on how to have more then 1 FBML tab on a page
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Twitter: Your Instant Feedback Machine
Yesterday, I presented a webinar for HigherEdHero dealing with social media – focusing on Twitter and Facebook. Nothing earth-shattering there, but I found myself quickly turning to Twitter get feedback not only after the presentation but often during it.
Here are a few mentions from yesterday, some of which were posted during the presentation.
I’ve followed up with a few people via email and Twitter as well to get some more detailed feedback about what they think I should cover in similar presentations in the future, and the questions I’ve received from Twitter, email and Facebook in the last 12 hours have been great, lots of great ideas, suggestions and feedback.
With pretty much every event, web conference, webinar, seminar and get together being tweeted about (and hashed for easy searching), Twitter is becoming a great tool for self-improvement and growth if you present, though you need a somewhat thick skin.
I’ll be talking about social media at the WhippleHill User Conference in early July. If you’re going to that event, please stop by and say hi.
If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, you can check out a full listing of my past and upcoming presentations.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
