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How to block individuals from sending you event invites on Facebook

July 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Facebook falls frequently under the love/hate category. I am often amazed at how up to date people that I rarely interface with are when I see them in person due to our connection on Facebook. Love that. Some of the changes Facebook makes that affect our privacy drives me batty. Consider the recent feature where they changed your default Email address in your profile to @facebook.com. I feel connected to my family and friends regardless of where they are. Love that. See what I mean? Love…. hate… love…. hate Facebook.

Sanity Retention Department

One way we can all keep our sanity is to learn to do things that will protect our connections from driving us crazy and enable our friends to do likewise with any of our annoying Facebook habits. This often involves learning the privacy and account settings intimately. Something I’ve found recently is I have some serial event inviters who are otherwise good friends. There is a solution – you can selectively block people who are inviting you to events that you will never attend on a frequent basis. Here is the relief:

Navigate to the Privacy settings tab in the main menu, this is currently located at https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy

Once you are there, scroll to the bottom of the page and find “Blocked People and Apps” and click Manage Blocking:

Select this

Now start typing the name of the serial inviter in the Block app Invites field, the autocomplete feature should kick in at some point. Anyone you have previously blocked will be listed under this field:

Type the name of the individual you wish to block

That’s it, the no longer offending friend can continue their Facebook friendship with you.

Image compliments of Skley, creative commons license.

Filed Under: Facebook, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Expand your content sharing with Print Friendly and PDF

October 21, 2011 By 8 Comments

As bloggers we’re always looking for ways to make our content more friendly, encourage conversation and encouraging distribution of the content to amplify our voice. I recall seeing the Print Friendly plugin for the first time over at Waxing Unlyrical. I thought it was interesting but didn’t connect the dots until yesterday that is.

Why some of your readers will love this plugin

Think for a moment about your less tech savvy readers, the ones who may not even have a Twitter account or won’t bother to click the LinkedIn share because they rarely log in. Or think about the friends and connections of your tech savvy readers that won’t want content delivered anywhere but the old tried and true – Email. This is where the true power of Print Friendly lies. In this video I demonstrate how the plugin works and describe in more detail why I think it is great for the web 1.0/Email crowd.

Video not showing up? Try this direct link.

Filed Under: Productivity, Technology, Video, Wordpress, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Facebook makes big changes to Pages Interface

February 10, 2011 By 10 Comments

Facebook has long neglected the Pages interface but that all changed today with some big changes. The best way to summarize the changes is that your Facebook page will function more like a user profile does. A couple of the extremely welcomed new features:

  1. The ability to comment on your page as yourself and not the page.
  2. Notifications via Email when users comment. (Cool but Hyper-Alerts is still better!)
  3. A cleaner more familiar user experience.
  4. A news feed for your home page.


This is the image that greeted me tonight when I logged into my page:
Facebook Pages Upgrade Dialogue
I will be providing a lot more data on this, but this ought to get you started with this new feature.

Filed Under: Facebook, News, Productivity, Technology, Video Tagged With: , , ,

Save travel and searching time with a custom Traffic Map

February 8, 2011 By 2 Comments
DC Traffic

DC Traffic photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

While spot checking traffic on Google Maps today I went to refresh the map I’d created and it disappeared. I then realized that you need to create a link using the Google maps interface in order to be able to refresh the window correctly. It dawned on me that others are encountering a similar issue and might find a simple effective link easier to use. This video demonstrates that and will save you travel and searching time. I’ve found that often here in the Bay Area you can save a lot of time by waiting 15-20 minutes especially coming out of peak times. I also will use the custom traffic map to decide which way to go depending on where the worst traffic is at the time. Hopefully this will also save you time.

More from the idea farm… what else can you do with this?

For starters you can use your URL shortener like mine to create a really simple link that you can reference at any time from any device (where you have not already bookmarked the link) For example I turned this messy link:


http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.589207,-122.140503&spn=0.582183,1.742706&z=10&layer=t

into this simple link:


http://msol.us/b

Email it to your smart phone
By emailing this link to your smart phone such as my Motorola Droid, you will be prompted to open it using either a browser or Google Maps. By selecting Google maps you will be able to quickly and easily view the map on your phone without fumbling around. You could also create and send a link to a friend or loved one travelling to the airport, etc. I ran into a similar situation several weeks ago when my Podcast guest @dcfemella was running late in DC traffic. I was able to relay a little bit of information to her. Next time I find myself in that situation, I will mail them a link to their smart phone.

Do you have other ideas about how you could re-purpose this Traffic Map link?

Filed Under: Idea Farm, Productivity, Video Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Facebook Tips – Tagging best practices and etiquette (Video)

January 10, 2011 By 44 Comments

I recorded this video to show people how to use the relatively simple tagging function on Facebook. I also explain more in depth in the video some of the etiquette involved with tagging people and pages. This is a great introduction to the feature if you are unsure how to use it or are looking for a starting point on etiquette.

What would you like to see?

Do you have any Facebook related topics that you’d like to see a video of? Please let me know and I will try to include it in this series.

Video Screenshot

Mentioned in this video/post @Lifehacker and @Shonali

Filed Under: Facebook, Productivity, Video, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to use Tagxedo to embed a cool tag cloud on your Blog

January 3, 2011 By 4 Comments

Tagxedo Tag Cloud of Joe's Gone SocialHave you tried Tagxedo? It’s a pretty nifty little app I spotted on @liendi11′s  Amplog recently. While playing around with it I realized that it was more difficult to get the clouds to work in WordPress than one would think so when I found a way to get it to work I also created a video to explain it. The method that I demonstrate shows you how to create a tagxedo cloud that is usable in both pages, posts and even as a widget. The main thing that needs to be modified is the size of the iframe code that is provided in the tagxedo code snippet. Here is the video followed by a live example of the tag cloud.

In the live example of a Tagxedo Tag cloud below you’ll note that all of the links go to the default function in the setup – a Google search page. Ideally a blog specific search should be used. I’d imagine someone will get creative and port it to a WordPress plugin before too long but until now you can see the possibilities. (Note: If you click the tags it will take you off my site and to Google search, apologies I should have adapted it to my site search!)

Filed Under: Blogging, Images, Social Media Strategy, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to delete posts from your amplog on Amplify.com (Video)

December 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

This video is a direct response to the top two search terms that brought people to my blog this past week. First of all thank you for coming. This video answers two questions that a number of people are asking:

  1. How do you delete posts from MyAmpLog
  2. hide my amplogs on amplify

Here is the video:

Any questions about Amplify (or anything else) feel free to ask in the comment section or on my Youtube Channel

Filed Under: Amplify, Blogging, Technology, Video, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Howto create your own url shortening service (Video)

December 10, 2010 By 11 Comments

Earlier this week you might have read my post about why it might be time to create your own URL shortener. Today I am responding to several reader comments and providing a detailed video on how to do it. If you are looking to create your own URL shortening service you may want to watch both of the videos in this post, this video is simply a test drive of the URL shortening service interface. I suggest you watch this one and decide if it is worth the trouble, or if you’re already convinced just skip it and view the second video below.

If the service passed muster and has the features you need, you will want to make sure you meet some pre-requisite items:

  1. Hosting account somewhere that supports MySQL databases and PHP (almost every host does).
  2. Domain name (the shorter the better, in this case I use 0b0.us)
  3. FTP Client (I would recommend Filezilla to Windows users)
  4. Will power to carefully watch the video below and potentially adapt the procedures to your own hosting companies MySQL setup.

Now that you’ve covered the checklist and without further ado, the goods:

I would love to hear if you completed this process yourself, let me know how it worked out. If you still need help feel free to post your questions in the comments below.
YOURLS Logo

Filed Under: Idea Farm, Technology, Twitter, Video, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , ,

Uses of the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress (Video)

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.

Filed Under: SEO, Tools, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Getting the most from Blogtalkradio.com as a listener

August 9, 2010 By 8 Comments

It seems like it should be simple, but there are a couple things that you should do if you plan to listen to a podcast on Blogtalkradio.com in advance of the episode you plan to listen to. It is really important to register in advance so you can easily participate in the chat channel that exists for most Blogtalkradio programs. I personally use this chat extensively for audience interaction and questions for my guests.

Sign up for an account

Before you navigate to Blogtalkradio.com to create your account login to Facebook if you have an account there. It will definitely save you time because you can “Connect with Facebook” option instead of the full blown manual account creation. Once you are at Blogtalkradio.com choose the Create Account option in the upper right hand corner of the landing page. That will bring up the registration page where you can use Facebook to connect or manually add the information. If the Facebook option doesn’t work or if you don’t have a Facebook account, just go ahead and fill out the information in the sign up form. You will need to confirm manual setup via Email, the system will send you a message to your Email address from service@blogtalkradio.com to the Email address you provided. Once confirmed you can login and complete your profile.

Using the chat, favorite programs, adding friends

Once you are authenticated to the system you can access the podcast(s) you want to and participate in the chat. While logged in you also have the benefit of favoriting shows, becoming friends with other users and even setting up your own free podcast. If you’d like to connect with me at Blogtalkradio visit my show’s page.

No Internet Access during the episode? No Problem.

Every episode has a dial in number that you can call. Just keep in mind the free accounts have a limit of 5 callers so you may have issues getting through. My program is upgraded and allows up to 50 callers so if you get a busy signal the first time you might want to keep trying.

Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: , , , ,
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