If you have bought a PSG Template from the SocialGo Template Store, please join the group that corresponds with your template. Right now there are some code snips for adding a logo to your PSG Template, and also ways to edit your template header by adding your own images. We will be adding new tutorials and code snips as time goes on and will alert the group members of the latest customizations. 

Update

I don't know if I just missed it or they added this feature in the last few days. Anyhow, you can now upload your favicon directly into SG in the account details area. Well, now if you have another site, you'll know how to do it. 

You've worked hard on your network, creating it unique to you and your vision, but there is one small detail I bet, at least some of you, have over-looked. In the url bar of your browser is a neat little icon of your logo (well it will be once you get your favicon in there). Right now, if you havn't set your favicon it's socialgo's icon your sport'n to all your members. This icon shows up in the url bar, tabs and bookmarks.

Now you can use any format of an image file you want, but the proper way to do this would be to define the profile in your head tag, which we can't do since we don't have access to the head tag, and then to define the "type" inside of the link. This is what it will look like:

type="image/gif"
HREF="http://www.networklogic.net/prosocial/favicon.gif"/>

Another way would be to use a ICO file and skip defining the TYPE:

Now all we need to do is make a ICO, png or gif file. Here is the plug-in you will need for an ICO file format in Photoshop.

ICO Photoshop Plugin This is also tested to work in Paint shop Pro and Photoshop Elements. Instal the plugin by putting it in your Photoshop Foler > Plugins > File Format. Then close and restart Photoshop.

The size of a Favicon is 16x16 and we will transform and optimize our image using photoshop. 

1) create a blank 16x16px file in photoshop

2) copy and paste your logo into this document, before you click enter, resize the image to fit the 16x16px.

3) aply filter "unsharpen mask" to image (filter>Sharpen>unsharpmask). I really crunch it because it's so small and blurry - my settings are:

• Amount - 40
• Radius - 1.8
• Threshhold - 3

4) save file as ICO

5) upload to you server

6) insert Code above into the head of your Ads/HTML area of Admin, Make sure to replace the url with the Url of your image. Tada!

One Problem I've found:

Once you set up your own URL, it seems to work seamlessly.

If you have not set-up your own url and pointed it at the socialgo servers you will have a flicker of the socialgo favicon when a page first loads. Once you set up your URL though, it seems to work seamlessly.

As we talked about yesterday. sometimes the CSS work you do on your network can look a little different on other browsers. Even compliant modern browsers. I use browsershots which allows me to check my site design in many different browsers and OS-es. But its a pain in the %$#@. Now there seems to be a easier way using Xenocode. You download web applications to run different browsers from the web. Read more about it on Webappers. 

But, it doesn't work for the mac. 

ALERT: seems some folks ran into a trojan on download of these files, so proceed at your own risk.  

Well the beans have been spilt :) over at widget laboratory  on Pro Socialgo's new templates.. So why not spill the rice too? We've been working hard to create some attractive and functional templates that will break the mold of the Socialgo-squarpants look. Above you see one from the Lost-n-Found series which will cover many interests and topics. I hope to do a podcast on creating the wood shelf, but how many times have I said that. 

That's about it for now, there are many MANY more designs, but I have to keep something secret. Besides a few "just for fun" templates, I'm trying to hit on many different styles and topics so as to cover the bulk of SG user's needs. If there is a style or topic you think would reach a wide Socialgo audience please drop me a line and let me know. I would love to hear the thoughts of those out on the battle field and what kind of designs your looking for.

I shouldn't write this article because I haven't tweeted in awhile, but that's because my iphone is broke, and that is how I tweet. But I just have to tell you, (ya you the one that thinks twitter is a waist of time) how great this micro blogging platform can help your traffic. 

When I'm tweeting regularly, I pick up another 10% -15% traffic spikes, and that's big, just think if I tweeted more than two times a day. As I've pointed out before, I don't do allot of SEO, marketing etc.. for my Socialgo networks but I do in my 9-5. 

What is twitter? 
Heck if I know. It's called micro-blogging and 95% of everything I read on there makes me feel like I've waisted 10 seconds of my life. But there are those jewels I pick up here and there,  latest news, funny stuff, and business advice. If I ever have a question, or am making a decision in blockbuster, I can tweet it and get plenty of good advice. 

Grab on to those last words "good advise," That is what you want to be known for on twitter. You want to be the come to guy or gal in your certain speciality (or what your network is about).  If it's about hanging out and making friends, you should be hanging out and making friends on Twitter, then invite them over for a chat, or to check out a funny blog. If you have a fishing network, you should send out some good websites, news, videos on fishing regularly. Not like every tweet, that gets old, and everyone knows what your doing. It should be very natural.

This is what I do with littleprayerbox. I follow the 50-50 rule. %50 percent of my time on twitter is spent trying to be funny, responding to tweets and yak'n it up. The other %50 is spent either sending a relevant news link, a link to someone who needs prayer (on my site), or answering tweets that are in my network's speciality. So %50 chillin, and %50 promoting me and my site. 

Tools of the trade 
On the go - If you have a iphone there are several (12-15) free twitter apps. I love Twitterrific. It is very clean and easy to use but I also use Twinkle for m other twitter account. It's nice to have two apps so you don't have to login and out. You can also text your tweets from any mobile phone read about it here.

Desktop -  On m desktop I use tweet Deck, I've tried others and this one is the mostest. You can split up your screen to view different information, like direct tweets to you, messages and even just your favorites (i think). This is a must because, it's like the pro-tweet tool. 

Broadcast twitter on Socialgo -  Now with the socialgo Layout manager it's easy to broadcast your tweets anywhere on your SG site. you can see my broadcast, how it works on littleprayerbox.com about page.

It's very easy to do this just go to twitter widgets here sign in  select "other." grab the html code and drop it in one of your widget areas of the Layout Manager. You can see it working, and also styled with CSS on my prayer site.  Now your network can keep up with your everyday minutia. 

Twitter Marketing tools - There are many tools that help you manage your twitter account with more precision than twitter allows. 

TweetLater -   This is probably the most popular tool. there are others that do similar functions, but so far I haven't found one better. One of the best things you can do with this service is in it's title, you can schedule tweets. I do this sometimes, but don't do it too much, people catch on, and don't like it when your tweeting but not there. Another great thing you can do is have a email sent to you of tweets with any keyword you define. So for me, I have a daily email sent with every tweet with "socialgo" in it. This is a great way to find friends or a market directly targeted to your service or network. For your red snapper fishing site, you could have every tweet that has "red Snapper Fishing" Then add those people. The last thing I'm going to touch on is the auto friend. You can set it up that whenever someone ads you as a friend, you automatically add them and it sends them a email that you specify -- keep it chill, like "thanks for adding me, hope I don't bore you, here is my site if you want to know more about me (site)."I wouldn't suggest this for your personal twitter account. Only for biz.  

Twitter blasts - If you have a Facebook or Linkden, myspace and others, you can funnel your tweets into the accounts. Facebook actually has a app for this, read about it here. But what I do mostly is use my BETA quub.com account which feeds into like 8 social networks, and it is a social network it's self, so I make friends there too.. very cool site. There is another one I've been playing with that also does this called this moment also in beta. This Moment is so very useful and fun. It trys to tie all your networks to gather, like you tube face book and on.. Havn't spent much time on there yet. 

Social book mark your tweets - Click Ball  is by far my favorite way to tweet. It is a social bookmarking site that lets you update your status both on twitter and clickball with a firefox plugin (get when signing up). What's cool about this, is you can easily send TINY URLs with just a click. When your just surfing around and you see something useful for your twitter community, just click the red ball. A form drops down, you write, "check out this funny monkey," it shrinks the URL and tweets it. I've made allot of friends at Clickball also because it's easy to find people with the same interests and follow them, on the other side some people like my bookmarks and can follow me on twitter just the same. There are other twitter plugins for firefox, but none this simple, and don't forget your getting two times the broadcast because you are broadcasting to click ball and twitter at the same time. This is great for link building. I send out a clickball with every blog I write on here (well I did, I'm behind)

Tweet your way to traffic  
I hope that's a start for you.  Twitter traffic is good targeted surfers, IF, ou don't just go adding willy nilly every body on this side of earth. Use tweet Later and pick your friends well. Have fun with it, make friends and contribute good content to your community. I (and others) can smell someone just out for my traffic a mile a way. 

I will be out of touch for atleast two more days. It you have a problem with a template from the template store please mail me from inside the store
Thank you, and those of you in the know, please help others on this site if you can.. would be greatly appreciated.
ez 

If you've purchased the Fatbaby template than you've noticed it's like nothing Socialgo Networks have seen. It's a fully liquid layout - meaning it stretches to fill any screen, and squishes down to a tiny 720px. Now with great power must come great responsibility so there are a few things to realize and practice on your fatbaby networks. First is the cool little function that resizes your pictures for you, so everything stays kosher when stretched out to the outer limits of 1200px. 

Picture Resize

The picture resize will take any image placed in your blog, profile (avatar) or group (avatar) and resize it accordingly with the size of someone's monitor. Here are a few guidelines to go buy. 

1. You want your blog pictures  to hit the average size of most monitors so that it is not stretched to a blurry mess. This would mean if you post a picture that's tiny 20px x 20px it's going to strech to 700px on a 1200px wide monitor. 

The remedy:  Hit the average sweet spot. The sweet spot falls between 500px and 600px. If you don't know all this mubo jumbo px stuff, than the rule of thumb is that the picture should be big enough to fill two thumbs on your screen. For tiny pictures. Just drop them on a white, or cool looking back ground that is larg enough to fit the blog. 

Universal Blog rules

Don't think because you have a Fatbaby your load is greater than others. Just look around at a handful of blogs. People that care about their blogs care about it's appearance. So, it is a common practice to size your images to fit the layout of your blog... in short, everyone should be doing this. 

User Driven Blogs

If your blog is open to the public you won't have so much control. But here is the cool thing about the public.. they almost always post pictures too big for the blog. I know this from having a user driven blog. They grab them off the net, or from their iphoto and the picture is usually sized to fit a avrage page (because it's off the net) or it's freak'n huge because the uploaded it from their camera. BUT, if you do have a problem, we will be posting how to remove this feature in your fatbaby group. 

 

Hey I've been busy so this is just a reply to an email, I have not tested this in all browsers so will need to be tweaked for your particular site. Mabye someone that has done this can chime in. I also did not test "not logged in" but you would use the not logged in tag, which slips my mind at the moment to remedy this. 



with just a quick test this works but no bug testing and also you will have to adjust the sizes of zone-e (must have LM turned on or you would use a different tag I think it's #main-content would replace #zone-e ) My code is redundant, to show you what is happening. The commas important. 

Please visit our new PSU forum and give us your wish list of topics for the soon to come ProSocialgo University Broadcast classroom. We have some great guest lined up on topics including SG CSS, General Business, SEO/Marketing and if there is a demand AJAX/PHP and flash design. These will be very small intimate classrooms to keep our heads from blowing up. You can email us at psu@prosocialgo.com or visit our forum to vote on the topics you want first. 

If your trying to put a logo on one of our templates this will work for most, you will just need to adjust the height.. don't mess with the width because it already spans the page. As you see I use the !important to overide anything in our original style sheet.. (comes in handy) One More thing for the love of  Al Gore's green earth don't try to add headers and logos through the SG network designer.. it is not made to work with templates from the template store (yet).