A Guide to Filtering Facebook Friends

Think about it, does your mom's ex-hairdresser's cousin's lifecoach need to know everything about you? Besides, what if you are sitting across from them right now in a job interview? Then read and bookmark this helpful guide from the NYT to sorting out your friends on a need-to-know basis on Facebook.

A Guide to Filtering Facebook Friends

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

My latest client wanted to have some RSS feed buttons in a sidebar of their company blog. Turns out, chicklets come in all shapes and sizes and they wanted everything to line up in a nice little grid. What to do?


Step 1. Get your chicklets

I found two good places to get feed chicklets. The client had a Feedburner account, so I signed in, and went to the feed I wanted to connect the chicklets to and then clicked on Publicize > Chicklet Chooser. Then, it was simply a matter of selecting the Feed Reader icons that I wanted to use and copying and pasting the code into a text file.

Another method for grabbing chicklets is to try Top Rank's chicklet chooser service. It offers a slightly different range of chicklets and helps you cover the bases.

Step 2. Put the chicklets on your blog.

The Wordpress blog I was working with had a widgetized right sidebar so I took all the various chicklet code snippets and added them into a widget, then wrapped them in a Div entitled "Chicklets". (Jenn Tip: Tables only work in certain browsers, Safari freaks out over tables and CSS mixing)



Then, since the chicklets were going to be in 2 columns, I created two divs inside the first one. Chickletsleft and Chickletsright. Then, it was simply a matter of assigning floats, widths and text-align.




Step 3. Customize your chicklets

Take a look at your blog and see how the chicklets look. Most chicklets are 16-17 pixels high, but the width can vary by 10 pixels or more. If you look at the code for each chicklet you will notice that some actually contain the image dimensions in the img src tag and you can change the width there. This works if you are only shortening it by about 3 pixels or so. Some chicklet code snippets only give you the image and no way to manipulate the size. Never fear, you can substitute your own custom-sized chicklet! Simply take a screenshot of the chicklet you need to resize and then create a new file in your image-editing program that is the "standard" size you want. In my case, 90 by 17 pixels worked. Then, copy and paste the screenshot of the chicklet into the new image file and save it. Now, you can modify it to your heart's content and then upload the optimized jpg, gif or png to your web site's images folder.

Step 4. Upload your custom chicklet

Using your FTP program, upload the image to your website in the images directory. If you have lots of images, you may find it worth your while to create a sub-directory called Chicklets.

Step 5. Customize your code snippet.

Now, all you need to do is replace the current img src file path with one that points to the custom chicklet image on your server.

For example:
img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif"
would become:
img src="http://jennmearswebdesign.com/wp-content/themes/anubis folder/images/chicklets/googlebutton.gif"


There you go. Pixel-precision control over your chicklets!

(if only the rest of my job were this easy)

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

Web Trawling

It's been a busy busy busy day. Chloe's got a bad head cold and it's too cold to take her outside, but in between swiping her nose with a tissue and infusions of orange juice, I found some fun stuff today:

1) Combination birdcage and aquarium on Fazai38's blog.

2) Techcrunch wrote a good post on how to increase your Twitter following.

3) I found a pretty cool video on Youtube for a post I did on Salem Living about Lunar New Year at the PEM.

4) Web Design Depot has a great article about choosing a CMS platform that I can't wait to read as soon as tiny hands stop pulling me away from the keyboard.

Web Trawling

Blogger Tools On Mashable

Mashable has a really useful post about 25 Great Blogger Widgets. Stay tuned to see some of them showing up here soon!

Blogger Tools On Mashable

Just Like Amazon, But Cozier...

Recommended by Elge Premeau, Good Reads is like an online bookclub, without the added pressure of being responsible for the baked goods. (Users seem to have a love/hate relationship with "Twilight")

Just Like Amazon, But Cozier...