Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Seattle Interactive Conference: Learn the Cloud

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Technical Content, Technical Experts

The Cloud Experience track at SIC is for experienced developers who want to learn how to leverage the cloud for mobile, social and web app scenarios.  No matter what platform or technology you choose to develop for, these sessions will provide you with a deeper understanding of cloud architecture, back end services and business models so you can scale for user demand and grow your business.

Register today using the promo code “azure 200” and attend SIC for only $150 (a $200 savings).

  • Attend a full day of technical sessions and learn more about leveraging the cloud for mobile, web and social scenarios. View the list of confirmed Cloud Experience speakers.  Sessions include:
    • Great Mobile Apps Make Money – Intro to Cloud Experience Track
    • Mobile + Cloud, Building Mobile Applications with Windows Azure
    • Zero to Hero: Windows Phone, Android, iOS Development in the Cloud
    • Building Web Applications with Windows Azure
    • Building Social Games on Windows Azure
  • Cloud Experience speakers and technical experts will be available to provide technical assistance and resources for developing, deploying and managing mobile, social and web apps in the cloud.

Seattle Interactive Conference (SIC): November 2-3, 2011, The Conference Center at WSCC

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

How to remove G+ and add proper sharing buttons to your Blogger Blog like Facebook, and Twitter!

If you’re not one of the few that uses Google+, then Google’s Sharing defaults inside of Google Blogger aren’t necessarily for you.  The scream Google sharing only.  The e-mail button is an icon of GMail, Google+ is the biggest sharing button.  Sure you can get to the others, but they are little buttons.  Don’t you want to be mainstream?

Here’s how I changed it with a little help from A Consuming Experience.

Getting your sharing code snippets

First, before I even touched my blog, I went to the appropriate sites to obtain my sharing buttons.  For me, that was the Facebook Like Button, Twitter’s Tweet Button, and LinkedIn’s Share Button (although I don’t use this one on my photo blog).  From these pages, you should use the UI to decide how you want the button to look for your site.  Make sure you specify a URL to Like, Tweet, or Share, this is a temporary URL, I used http://foo.bar.com. This is a placeholder for later.

I saved each of these code snippets into Notepad for copy/paste later.

Adding the sharing code to the Blogger blog

Inside your Blogger Dashboard, select the blog you wish to add your sharing buttons to, then click the “template” modification and choose to Edit the HTML:

Templete / Edit HTML

Choose to Proceed when you edit the HTML, and then make sure you select Expand Widget Templates that’s at the top:

Expand Widget Templates

Scroll down until you find the <b:include id=’shareButtons’ var=’post’> tag.  I deleted everything between that tag, and </b:includable> and replaced it with my own sharing code.

This is where things get fun. 

You need to replace that http://foo.bar.com with the URL of the blog post.  Google puts that information into a variable and replaces it at the time the page is rendered.  So we simply need to do this as well.  Let’s take a look at the twitter code, because it’s the simplest. 

Here is what Twitter gave me:

<a class='twitter-share-button' data-count='horizontal' data-via='seandaniel' data-url=”http://foo.bar.com” href='https://twitter.com/share'>Tweet</a><script src='//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js' type='text/javascript'/>

note that I have bolded the temporary URL we need to replace with the URL of the blog post.  With the help of the above website, this is what I changed it to:

<a class='twitter-share-button' data-count='horizontal' data-via='seandaniel' expr:data-url='data:post.url' href='https://twitter.com/share'>Tweet</a><script src='//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js' type='text/javascript'/>

Note I have added the expr: phrase which tells Google there is something to replace after the “=” sign.  I then put in the URL variable data:post.url, and also changed the quotes from double quotes to single quotes.  Google interprets that code and inserts the actual URL of the individual blog post.  Thus if they tweet on the main page with all the posts, they still only tweet the one that they are intending to, instead of the entire feed of posts.

So yeah, a little harder than their previous format where you had just put in <$BlogPostPermanentURL$>, but not too difficult all the same. 

Now on my blog you can see the following at the bottom of each post, without having to put that Google + link there.

Sharing Buttons

Cleans things up and standardizes them all in one.  Enjoy.