Anatomy of a Blog - Scripting for Social Media

There's a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part....

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I'm assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You've got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um... not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I'll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the 'rel-tag'. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page's header. Now when you're displaying 'rel-tag' that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a 'tag'.

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/tags/great+blog rel='tag'>great blog</a>

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I've separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/cross_media_is_now_our_life' rel='bookmark'>Cross Media is now our life!</a>

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel="alternate" and type="application/rss+xml" to define a META link to an RSS file.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="MagiBlog - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Magiblog" />

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I've showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.

Realistic Fog/Smoke Effect

Here's another effect using AS3 to make fog with source files below.


View: http://bishport.com/fog.html

Source: zip

Realistic Flame Effect

This is my first attempt at creating a realistic flame effect in Actionscript 3.0 so be gentle.


View: http://bishport.com/flame3.html

Source: zip

Your Company on Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the most widely used online direction services on the web. That being said, have you checked your company's listing on Google maps recently. In Google Maps' Local Business Center you can manage your company's address, services, image and much more. It also boosted my company's site up on the local listings. It did take 2 weeks to verify the changes but it was definitely worth it.

Google Docs for Desktop

So while wandering around the Print OnDemand Expo in Boston I bumped into a small Google booth. So in conversation I was told that Google will be releasing a desktop version of Google Documents and Spreadsheets. Furthermore, they said you can expect to see a new link showing up on your Gmail page...
I was told it will be something similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint. Where was this information 6 months ago when my company chose Basecamp over Google Apps. Although, i do love my Basecamp.

In other news from OnDemand 08, some cool stuff is going on in the world of variable data publishing. Lots of cool web-to-print apps as well as InDesign plugins. Its also cool to see an array of PURL solutions on the market, however I am still not impressed. Every solution I've seen is limited in one way or another; bad reporting, limited functionality, no security, etc.

However, overall it was a good time.

Personalized Landing Pages 2.0

So its no news that a personalized landing page as a response portal to any kind of direct marketing campaign can increase response rates dramatically, but where's the next step up?

Well it seems as if there are multiple cross-media technologies emerging from the web to help engage, interact and even entertain the user, therefor increasing conversions. People have seen XMPie and other related products do cool things with people's names and putting them in the picture. But what if the user could change their name at runtime. Furthermore what if the users name wasn't in a picture, but in a short movie. This is the future of PURLs as a response portal and will be a hit in the social media world. Already I was pointed to a website for a TV Show on FX and I was amazed at what they had done. Here is a PURL someone made for me. I like everything about it, from the page looking like a blog to my name being inserted into the movie.

Now here's something my own company put together. Basically I wanted the user to be able to interact with the flash movie in real time from outside of the movie itself via the web-form. Using javascript, I was able to insert the users name into the newspaper at runtime and its had an amazing response. People need a break from their every day activities and these fun side trackers give them this opportunity, so both the user and the company win.

So I'll say it now and say it loud. Get Interactive, Engage your Audience and become successful.