Edward Lewis Google Chrome Advert

June 1st, 2011

One of my friends told me about the Edward Lewis Google Ad a few days ago. After looking at the stats for my website, it seems like a lot of people are searching for it!

Dear Hollie, from Edward Lewis:

Funny that there is another version that uses someone with a different name too..

Dear Sophie, from Daniel Lee:


Both of them should get a blog, it would be really freaky getting years worth of emails like that from your dad.. wouldn’t it?!

All in One SEO Pack – Annoying Dashboard Section

May 2nd, 2011

I have just installed the lasted version of the All in One SEO Pack on one of my websites.. I haven’t used this version before and it’s slightly different to the one that I have used in the past.

wordpress dashboard

The new version has added in some extra columns on the post dashboard on the right hand side. This is quite annoying as there isn’t really room for them, it means the post titles get crushed up and spread over quite a few lines – this makes the page about 5 times as long!

So.. does anyone know the best way to fix it, so that they arent shown there?!

Disconnected Warehouse Party

April 7th, 2011

Here’s a video from the first Disconnected warehouse party in Nottingham we did in October.

Thanks to Matt for filming it and editing it up. Thanks to Seiji for playing at the party and for the tune that he sent over to use in the video.

Keep your ears close to the ground for details about the next one!

Control the Thumbnail Images on Facebook Links

March 25th, 2011

When you post links on facebook a little thumbnail image will normally appear to the left hand side when it pulls back all of the information from the website. Sometimes, it’s pretty annoying because it will pick up a few random images from the web page and they aren’t always relevant to the link you are posting – often they are for different items or ads etc.

This is an example from the Assemble Online website

post link on facebook

How to control the thumbnail image on Facebook Links

It’s pretty simple, you just have to pick/create a graphic and then add one line of code to your website. In the section of the code you need to insert an additional metatag which specifies the image to use. This is an example from http://areyoudisconnected.co.uk:

<link rel="image_src" href="http://areyoudisconnected.co.uk/graphics/disconnected_logo.jpg" />

When you add the code to your site you will need to amend the image name and path to where your image is located.

What other information does facebook show when you post links?

link information on facebook

The link section also pulls in some additional information from the link you are posting. Sometimes this might be confusing as it doesn’t always match the content from the page you have looked at. This information is taken from the section of the page:

The other information is the title tag, meta description and also the url of the page.

facebook link html

Extra Advice

For sites which have a really large logo it is worth creating a smaller 100px wide version to make sure that it’s displayed correctly as facebook will resize the image down.

If you have posted links up in the past, facebook may have cached the thumbnail images from the previous occasion. If you add the code to your site and it doesn’t work correctly you should try uploading a different link or page. If you are posting a link to your homepage, add on the filename of the page, eg index.php, index.html or index.asp etc – whichever your site uses. From experience it seems like Facebook cache the images for around a week.

So is it possible to build a site in a weekend?

February 10th, 2011

The answer to that is definitely yes.. did I manage it with my Turn off your Lights site? Err.. No! It’s not the end of the word, I spent a fair chunk of time working on it and I’m fairly pleased with the progress. I made a cake too!

cake

There is a lot of content ready to go into the site and there has also been a fair bit of customisation on the back end of the CMS. I really like using Silverstripe to build websites, it has been a fairly steep learning curve with some areas but not it is really starting to pay off. I’m using the latest 2.4.5 version too which came out a few days ago, which is, seemingly, exactly the same!

Anyone who wants to send in pictures to be featured on my site now have a pretty snazzy form to fill in. After its been styled should make things fairly straight forward. Most of the success of the site will rely on user generated content, so it will be important to make this process as simple as possible.

So.. I wonder what progress will have been made by next weekend!

recktangle

Edward Lewis, Nottingham, UK | 2009 - 2024