Woody Hayday | Blog | Hertfordshire .NET / SQL / PHP / Web Marketing and Business Developer and Consultant

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Hosting facebook Apps/Applications/iFrame Pages on 1and1 (SSL)

August 31, 2011

For those who run facebook fan pages you will likely know about fan gating and the importance of adding your own content to your facebook fanpage. This used to be done with the facebook static fbml app but that’s really the old way, looking forward the best way is to make its own specific app. There’s a bunch of really good stuff out there about setting up your apps but none of it seems to deal with the middle level guys who don’t want to shell out time/capital setting up amazon hosting (probably a good idea either way) or don’t strictly have https for the domain, those that just need an interim/growth testing solution with their current hosts, specifically in this case 1and1.

You can host facebook apps on any host, but hosting somewhere unsecure (not accessible via https) will flag up the following prompt for anyone browsing to the page with secure browsing turned on (high proportion of fb users.) You CAN also use amazon cloud storage (S3) for free https file storage, up to a level, however you cannot run server side code (php/ASP.NET) without setting up a server with their EC service.

facebook-fan-page-app-creation-on-1and1-ssl

Not pretty eh? What will that do to your conversion rates? Yep nothing good.

Read the rest : Hosting facebook Apps/Applications/iFrame »

Posted in Facebook Graph API, Facebook Pages, PHP, Social Media, Web Development, Web Technology Tagged 1and1, facebook, facebook apps, fan gating, fan page, ssl

Facebook Fan Page Branding Template – Illustrator

August 30, 2011

Facebook Fan Page Branding Template – Creating a facebook fanpage branding with Adobe Illustrator

As I have been dabbling with facebook fan pages I thought I would share a few of the take-away’s, in this case purely to do with the branding of your facebook page, increasingly an important outward factor in all web developments – facebook fan pages are perhaps the building blocks of a good social sprawl. I will post later about the technicalities of using fan-gated iframe apps (hosting them on 1and1/Amazon S3 for no extra cost) and similar but for now lets focus on the looks.

!	At the bottom of this post you can get a copy of the Facebook Fan Page branding template I have made in Adobe Illustrator, it has all the artboards setup so all you have to do is add your graphics and export!

Take a look at these few examples:

Read the rest : Facebook Fan Page Branding Template - »

Posted in Facebook Pages, Projects, Social Media, Web Development Tagged adobe, branding, facebook, fan page, illustrator

Why not to use big red arrows in display ads…

A masterful example of Adobe advertising, its almost as if LinkedIn placed it there knowingly!

Read the rest : Why not to use big red arrows in display »

Posted in Business Tagged adobe, linkedin

Remove unwanted eBay strings from A2P [Auction2post] posts with Automated Editor

August 18, 2011

Free rules file with this post!

Do you use Auction2Post [A2P]? If you don’t its a wordpress plugin which automatically implants listings from ebay as wordpress posts, including affiliate links through the ebay partner network from which you earn a commission. Its quite useful. Read my post about it here. Anyhow if you don’t use the plugin you can pretty much skip this post, unless you use a similar thing which is generating all kinds of nasty strings you don’t want in your posts 😉

This post will show you how to sanitise your auction2post posts for annoying (and contract breaking) ebay auction strings, it even has 125 rules already in a file for import!

The problem

Auction2Post is great in lots of respects, its well written and does a prescribed job. Where it caused irritation for me is arguably after its done its job, after the wordpress plugin had created its posts. You see you can create posts via templates, which is great, it allows enough customisation for most, however I wanted a bit of text processing as often you are left with irritating auction footers and garbage text which make the user hit back or close at a displeasing rate (some of these ebay strings might actually make your Auction 2 posts sites break ebay partner network terms of service, its really worth sanitising your posts as I describe below!)

For Example:

My EBAY User ID: yah00002009

welcome to Our ebay Store shop

IF YOU ARE NEW TO EBAY OR DO NOT HAVE A PAY PAL ACCOUNT PLEASE CONTACT ME SO WE CAN HELP MAKE ARRANGEMENTS WITH YOU

The Solution

This problem with Auction 2 Post and wordpress is one of the reasons Automated Editor was born, to give a bit more freedom in text processing, wordpress filters are great but I don’t think filtering hundreds of ebay phrases like that is effective.

Read the rest : Remove unwanted eBay strings from A2P »

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, PHP, Projects, Search Engine Optimisation, Snippets, Software, Web Development, Wordpress Tagged Auction2Post, Automated Editor

Facebook Like button not working or showing 0 likes

August 17, 2011

Got a facebook like button not working showing zero? Do you wan’t to add a facebook like button to your page that points to a facebook page (fanpage) rather than the page the likebutton is actually on? It is possible but you may have come across this facebook bug that I did.

facebook-like-button-0-count-problem-zero-count

Scenario’s are either:

Use facebook like button generator to generate code for a like button (sometimes even this bugs out..)
Use some service like ShareThis to generate code for a facebook like button

And when you stick it on the webpage:

It shows as Zero – Facebook likes ‘0’ even if you know that URL (that you installed it on, or fb page) has likes
It occasionally shows correct like count, but most of the time shows Zero [0] like’s

Investigate with:

Facebook Lint tool (object debugger)

After spending a few hours working out what was causing this 0 like problem on my facebook like button I narrowed it down to two problems people are experiencing:

Read the rest : Facebook Like button not working or »

Posted in Facebook Pages, Snippets, Social Media, Web Development Tagged facebook, fan page

Automated Editor Released!

August 11, 2011

A nice small chunk of a project, Automated Editor is a wordpress plugin which allows you to automate some of the post editing process. Written to be lightweight and flexible it can do a lot with a little input. The plugin replaces a previous script/small app I had previously commissioned to offer automatic string replacement/removal from posts at point of publishing. With this public release version though it has had all the bells and whistles added to it, and will do some other useful tasks such as the following:

Replace one string with another (String replace) e.g. Replace ‘X’ with ‘Y’
Remove instances of a string (String remove) e.g. Remove all instances of ‘X’
Replace strings which match a regex rule with another string (Regex replace) e.g. Replace any numbers (^[0-9]{3}$) with ‘y’
Remove strings which match a regex rule (Regex replace) e.g. Remove any numbers (^[0-9]{3}$)
Prepend a string onto the front of a post (Prepend) e.g. Add ‘X’ to the top of a post
Append a string onto the back of a post (Append) e.g. Add ‘X’ to the bottom of a post
Add a post into a category (Add category) e.g. Add category ‘X’ to the post if its not already added.
Add a tag onto a post (Add tag) e.g. Add tag ‘X’ to the post if its not already added.
Change a posts date
Change a posts status

(Taken from here.)

If you want to read more about the plugin you can check out this post on, What is the point in Automated Editor or go right ahead and get it from wordpress.org or buy the professional version at AutomatedEditor.com.

Watch this space for a few posts on how I use the plugin, (it works fantastically well when rigged up with Auction2Post.)

Read the rest : Automated Editor Released! »

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Business, PHP, Projects, Social Media, Web Development, Web Technology, Wordpress Tagged Automated Editor, Small Nugget Projects

get_tag_name function for wordpress

July 11, 2011

get_cat_name is a simple useful function to get the category name from its id in wordpress, there isn’t one for tag (and you cant use the same one…) so here’s I adapted it for tags. TBH its super lazy to be using this, but meh. Uses get_term.

function get_tag_name( $tag_id ) {

     $tag_id = (int) $tag_id;
     $tag = get_term( $tag_id, 'post_tag'; );

     if ( ! $tag || is_wp_error( $tag ) )

          return '';

     return $tag->name;

}

I am writing Automated Editor, a wordpress plugin which will give you a bunch of pro automation possibilities, in case you were wondering.

Read the rest : get_tag_name function for »

Posted in PHP, Snippets, Wordpress

Firefox, why you mutate my css?

June 30, 2011

Quick post to remove the annoyance that is this bug from my short term memory, you would think this would work:

var newBGString = $(this).css('background-image');

…it does, but not in firefox. Say the background property was set to “url(someimage.png) top left no-repeat”, making the background-image property “url(someimage.png)” right? In every browser except firefox, yes, not for firefox. Firefox would set the var as “url(“someimage.png”)” and THEN complain that the var is not realistic when you go on to use it elsewhere.

Anyway ridiculous bug, almost as annoying is how simple, hacky and rough the fix is:

var newBGString = $(this).css('background-image').replace('"','');

So if your firefox doesn’t like background image swapping via js, try it, I guess…

Read the rest : Firefox, why you mutate my »

Posted in Browser Compatibility, Javascript, Web Development Tagged firefox, JQuery

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WoodyHayday.com

A Quote..

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Albert Einstein