Archive for the ‘Best Practices’ Category

Igor Faletski at SitePoint rounds up 7 Tips To Make Your Web Site Mobile-friendly. The co-founder of Mobify, the popular service for optimizing a site for the mobile web, the author provides these quick recommendations for designing your own mobile site:

1. Style for mobile
2. Resize images
3. Automatically detect mobile devices
4. Rethink navigation
5. Provide a clear path to the full site
6. Don’t break links
7. Measure the mobile audience

Paul Burgess at nettuts provides an extremely detailed step-by-step tutorial for How to Create a Photo Gallery using the Flickr API. If you’ve been considering ways to set up a slick photo gallery for your library’s digital image collection you’ll want to give this a read. Each of these sections includes screenshots and code snippets.

• Step 1 - Get a Flickr API key
• Step 2 - Download phpFlickr
• Step 3 - Basic Setup and Simple Configuration
• Step 4 - Building the Thumbnails Page
• Step 5 - Build a Page to Display Single Photos

Twitter Lists are a new feature which allows you to group people into sets - even people you aren’t following. This is a great way to organize your Twitterers into lists such as: librarians, family, friends, etc. and then click into those lists for a tweet stream of what those people are saying. Josh Catone at Mashable has put together a guide to How To: Use Twitter Lists, and Jennifer Van Grove provides instructions as to how to Embed Your Lists on Your Blog.

Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING, gives Mashable readers 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips. Each recommendation outlines both basic and advanced strategies for leveraging social media tools to reach your goals. Some of the tools & suggestions discussed include:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Company Blog
4. LinkedIn
5. Participate On Other Blogs
6. Mobile Social Networks and other Local Strategies
7. Comments and Conversations About Your Company
8. Multimedia
9. Maintain Brand Consistency
10. Leverage Combinations of Social Media Tools

The Nonprofit Tech 2.0 blog has a quick guide to Five Essential Apps for Your Nonprofit’s Facebook Page. Many of these apps would also be particularly useful for a library’s FB page as well. During my presentation at the Suffolk County Library Association yesterday, I suggested two of these five for library Facebook pages, I can’t wait to check out the other three.

1. The Static FBML App
2. Causes App
3. Involver Apps
4. Social RSS App
5. Links App

You may also want to check out the blog’s Five Most Common Mistakes Made by Nonprofit Admins on Facebook.

Charles W. Bryant writes for HowStuffWorks about the Top 10 Things You Should Not Share on Social Networks. Even if you think you’ve got social networking figured out, you will want to read through the author’s discussion and warnings for each item on the list. Here are items 10 through 5:

• Personal Conversations
• Social Plans
• Linking Sites
• Company Information
• Photos of Your Kids
• Your Address and Phone Number

Chris Brogan talks about how to use social media to promote real-time events in How to Market an Offline Event Online. Be sure to check out the full post for more on his recommendations:

• Always a URL. Always
• Extend onto Event Sites
• Status, Status, Status
• Email Marketing
• Flickr and YouTube
• Blog Posts Matter
• Twitter on the Day Of the Event

The folks at MakeUseOf have published a 53-page Complete Guide to Twitter. If you want to get up to speed on how to effectively tweet, you’ll want to check out this guide which includes sections about:

• Hashtags
• ReTweeting
• Searching for Twitter Trends
• Managing Your Reputation on Twitter
• Twitter Apps and Bots You Should Know About
• Scheduling Your Tweets for Later

Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, tells Mashable readers about 5 Ways to Write Retweetable Tweets. If you want to learn how to create tweets that get passed along to others, check out these five tips:

1. Always Include a Link
2. Don’t Use Up All 140 Characters
3. When Retweeting, Add Something Original
4. Build Credibility With Your Bio and URL
5. Combine the Personal With the Professional

If you’ve considered turning your blog into a vlog or video blog, or just adding occasional video content, you’ll want to check out this Complete Guide to Video Blogging. Leah Betancourt at Mashable discusses concepts, tools, and distribution methods for this new media format.

• Video Blogging is Still in its Infancy
• Web Video Puts People on Equal Footing
• What Makes a Good Video Blog
• Creating a Video Blog
• Distributing a Video Blog

Social media guru Chris Brogan posts 14 tips for How to Blog Almost Every Day. Check out his useful recommendations to get yourself in the habit of writing for the Web. Here are his top five suggestions:

1. Read something new every day. Need a starting point? Try Alltop. (Hint: read something outside your particular circle to get new thoughts).
2. Talk with people every day. I get many of my topic ideas from questions people pose to me, or through conversations.
3. Write down titles and topic ideas in a notepad file. ( I’ve given you 100 blog topics and another 20 blog topics just to get started.)
4. Maintain a healthy bookmarking and revisiting habit. I use Delicious.com
5. Find 20-40 minutes in every day to sit still and type.

Barb Dybwad at Mashable has created a guide to organizing your contacts in Facebook with How To: Create Friend Lists on Facebook. Learn how to create these lists which will allow you to filter updates in your News Feed through this step-by-step guide. One thing I will add is that Friends Lists are a powerful way to customize your Privacy Settings in Facebook as well - once you’ve created individual lists you can determine exactly who sees what on your profile - including photos, Wall Posts, and more.

• About Friend Lists
• How to Create a Facebook Friend List
• How to Use Friend Lists
• How to Delete a Facebook Friend List

If you’re wondering how to add functionality such as IM chat widgets or other rendered HTML to your library’s Facebook Page, Andy Burkhardt, Emerging Technology Librarian at Chaplain College Library walks you through how to do it in this helpful 2-minute screencast.

The Accelerated Bachelor Degree blog has come up with a mega-list of 100 Ways to Use Twitter In Your Library. If your library is thinking about microblogging, you’ll want to check out these tips which are divided into the following categories:

• Reference
• Discussion
• Announcements & Updates
• Helpful Feeds
• Colleagues, Students, and Friends
• Library Twitter Tools that Could be Useful
• Vendors Using Twitter

via Mobile Libraries

Web Worker Daily has posted a helpful guide to 10 steps you can take to Be Your Own Tech Support. These are all very good tips. And I’ll add a couple of quick ones to the list which deal with problems that I am often emailed about by my students:

• If you’re on the Web and are having trouble with a Web site, or a Web form, try switching browsers before determining that it’s “broken”…some sites just work better with Firefox vs. IE, etc. Also, make sure you have the latest version of your browsers installed.
• If you’re in your library and can’t view a website or video, the link may not be broken but may be blocked by your systems office…try it again when you get home.
• And I can’t agree more with Meryl’s sixth suggestion which is “Search the web for a solution” - I have found nearly all my troubleshooting answers this way. There is a wealth of information posted in forums, message boards, and help sites and I’ve found more often than not that I’m not the first person experiencing the problem. If you can’t find the answer this way, I’d also suggest finding an appropriate forum and posing a question. I’ve received tons of advice, code snippets, and resolutions from helpful people who have responded to my queries.

Got a troubleshooting tip to add? Please share it in the comments!