When one of my friends on Facebook pointed out yesterday that there was now a “Like” button next to each comment on a Facebook post or status, I sort of rolled my eyes. To me, that just seemed to be overkill. I mean, know that the Like button has made it’s way outside of the walls for Facebook and into the rest of the Internet (including one of my sites), but trying to push it down another level of detail into the comment thread didn’t really seem necessary.

So, I went looking for an official post or other blog coverage of this new feature, and I found myself at the popular Inside Facebook blog. Here’s the article I found:

Facebook Adds Likes to Comments

To my surprise – and who am I to judge – they reported that this is actually a commonly requested feature. For real? People are asking to have a Like button when someone comments on their status or the status of a friend? I think I may just be missing the point.

What’s Really Missing

To me, I think the bigger gap related to comments to posts and statuses is not a Like button, but better notification and comment tracking for Facebook Page admins. As an admin of 4 pages currently, it’s less than ideal for me to have to check each one everyday or every other day to feel responsive to my visitors. And I know it would be difficult to create a reasonable solution that works for both smaller pages like mine vs. the thousands of comments on the page of your favorite championship sports team, but still, it feels like there’s more value to be made there.

As another example, I have a few photographer friends that have created Facebook pages to share their work. When they post photos and people comment, there’s no notification or anything. Now I know first hand in the case of photos there is a View Comments page – like this one – but would a subscribe or RSS feed option be too much to ask? Or maybe something similar to the Facebook Page Digest emails we admins received weekly for a brief while. Something daily like that might work to show a summary instead of each individual comment.

Any Insight?

I know that Facebook has been working to improve their Insights stats section, and I can only hope that those tools start getting closer to real-time soon. It’s Thursday night as I finish this post and stats are only current through Tuesday. Again, not horrible from a longer range trend perspective, but not a tool I can use for engagement.

Your Thoughts?

Getting back to topic, do you think the Like button for comments is a useful feature or just more fluff? And if you’re a Facebook Page admin, I’d sure like to hear your thoughts – or any tricks or tools – on staying current with engaging your visitors.

Thanks for reading,
- Kris

Just about a year after launching Maui by Photo, I’m getting back to putting some of the finishing design touches on the site to polish it off. These are mostly minor design tweaks for now, but I’m hoping to add more features my month’s end, too.

A Year Wiser

MBP was my first site using WordPress, so much of the initial effort involved was spent learning how to customize themes and organize posts than more of a focused effort on look and feel and navigation. So, with a year of WordPress under my belt, and another year of web design practice, minor changes are already underway.

While the premise of Maui by Photo is fairly straightfoward (a la the About page), there was more effort involved with editing and managing all the photos than I originally anticipated. Not only am I a year more experienced with WordPress, my photography and post processing work with Photoshop has also risen to a new level. Therefore, one of my tasks for later this summer (or year) is going to be re-editing all 300 current photos featured on the site, plus adding at least 100 more that aren’t featured yet. Heaven help me, that’s a lot of work ahead.

Quick Wins

In the meantime, I’ve been attacking a few quicker wins to make the site more interactive. The biggest update so far has been the integration of Facebook comments and Like buttons using the Simple Facebook Connect plugins I posted about recently. It’s been installed on my Kris and Cindy site and you may even notice it’s slowly being phased in at this blog, too.  Since the Maui by Photo page on Facebook has been a relatively big draw, I see this as an opportunity to bring in some of those users to contributing to the site as well. More to come on that.

While the Kris and Cindy site just uses the auto display for the Like button, I’m working that feature into MBP a little more selectively than that.  I have a few ideas of where it will end up to be intuitive but not obtrusive, but it’s not completely rolled out yet.

Also while I was at it, I added the Twitter @Anywhere integration that made it here, too (previous post).

More Content

The goal of Maui by Photo is to let the pictures do the talking, and get the sites visitors to leave their own stories about Maui. But in order to help raise awareness and education about the goals of the site, I’ve been writing a little bit more content to fill in the gaps. Therefore, the home page now has more of a traditional website landing page feel to it than the previous list of blog posts as before. Also, the About page has been updated with a bit more organization and some photos to help keep the reader engaged.

In addition to that, the portfolio page here on the site has been updated with a little background on how the site came together, so this collective information should be a good start. I’ve also uncovered a few additional items to add as mentioned in this post about creating effective About pages. Even though there is still a ways to go, I’m pretty happy with the subtle progress that’s being made so far.

Next Update

Even with these changes to the site underway, Maui by Photo is still fully functional and awaiting your favorite Maui stories. As far as the next update goes, I’m targeting another post here at the end of the month with news of bigger changes that are in the works. Be sure to stayed tuned if you’d like to see what I have in store next for this site.

– Kris

This will probably take more than one post to cover, but I thought I’d give it a little quick start. The final result: An automated way to feature new photo on a Facebook page or profile stream.

The Photos

There’s going to be some prep work on all those photos you’re going to need, but I’ll save that for another time. I already amassed my 366 photos for a daily calendar project, so that part was already taken care of. Those photos are hosted on Flickr and tagged with an individual date code. For example, the image in this post here is tagged with ‘c1117’ for November 17th.

Now, you don’t need to follow that tag approach, and you certainly don’t need a full year’s worth of photos to start with, but it’s one less thing you need to worry about later.

The Feed

Next up, you need a feed to serve up those files photos at regular intervals – such as every 24 hours.  For me, that’s where the date coded tags on Flickr came into play.  Using the Flickr API, I easily created an RSS feed for a daily photo that you can actually subscribe to over at my Maui Photo Day Calendar website.  It’s just a PHP file that determines the current date, and pulls the latest week worth of photos by their tags.

Other than the photo selection and tagging, this feed page is really the only code that you’ll need to right. Pretty simple.

The Delivery

So, you have the photos and the feed, all you have to do is tell Facebook about it.  For that, you can use just about any of the RSS applications on Facebook. I am happy with the Networked Blogs application, which many of my friends also use for their blog-to-Facebook needs.

Just plug in your Feed URL from the step above, and the app will take care of the work for you.  Depending on the Facebook app you choose, your mileage will vary as to when throughout the day your photo will be posted. If you’re not happy with the results, go ahead and try another app.  For me, I wasn’t too particular, so I just stuck with Networked Blogs.

The Result

If you want to see the final result, head over to my Maui by Photo page on Facebook.  It’s that easy.

If you do happen to be technically inclined and familiar with the Flickr API, take a look at this post that has more details about the API methods I’m using for the calendar project. They’re pretty much the same ones used in the feed, too.

With stuff like this, the sky really is the limit. I happen to be using this same set of imagery for an iPhone mobile web app, a WordPress Plugin, and looking into a Android widget. More details on those projects in the months to come.

Have Fun

If you do happen to implement something like this – whether it’s Facebook or anywhere else – please let me know and I’d love to check it out. If you’ve done something similar with a different technique or have another idea, feel free to share that, too.  There is no right or wrong way to skin this cat, and the more ideas, the better.

Enjoy,
- Kris

One of the things my wife and I enjoy about Facebook is the interactions with all of our friends and family who are using the service. So, when I finally got around to redoing our personal site – Kris and Cindy – I wanted to find away to integrate with Facebook for comments and other features.

Enter Simple Facebook Connect

Two years ago, for something like this, I would have dove head first into the Facebook API and tried to build it myself. Nowadays, however, now that I’m very limited on time and totally drinking the WordPress kool-aid, it was just a matter of finding someone else who’s already done this.

After a few quick searches, I found the Simple Facebook Connect series of plug-ins that seemed up to the task. Sure enough, it delivered.  It was a little cumbersome at the very beginning, but only temporarily until I played around with things. That was due, in part, because the entire series consists of 15-16 separate plugins, which you don’t typically see in 3rd party plugins.

The reasoning behind it, however, is pretty clever because features are then modularized so you only end up switching on the ones you want. To start, I activated the following plugins:

• SFC – Like Button
• SFC – Comments
• SFC – Login
• SFC – Register
• Simple Facebook Connect – Base (Required)

I’ve played around with a few others, but they don’t currently fit the needs for this site at the moment. However, once I work on updates to Maui by Photo, there are certainly other aspects I will be using.

For Now…

The “For Now” portion of the post title is in reference to the announcement that Facebook Connect is going away now that the new Open Graph API is taking over. The good news is that Otto, the author of the Simple Facebook Connect, will be working towards a 1.0 release of the plugin that will support the new API. Sweet!

Check it Out

If you want to see it in action, go ahead and visit Kris and Cindy and see how it looks. If you don’t see something worth commenting on but still want to test it, try it with this post.

If you want to see more from Otto, head over to his website or visit his Facebook page, of course.

Be sure to check back again when I have updates to Maui by Photo for more samples of this awesome plugin suite.

- Kris.

I spent much of the latter part of 2008 committing my time to two popular social networks, Twitter and Facebook. While having somewhat different goals for each, I mainly ignored their differences out of what you might consider laziness and mostly treated them the same. I even installed the Twitter application on Facebook to have all my tweets sent over to Facebook, which I guess wasn’t always relevant to my Facebook friends and vice versa.