Social media cross-posting with Friends+me

// I've recently posted about +Fotostat (http://bit.ly/g-fotostat) , a new service for cross-posting within several social networks, with focus on images. I have been using it with great success for a site I manage. But if your main network is #Google+, you are out of luck, because #Google has only given write access through the G+ API to selected third-party services like #Hootsuite.

An alternative service is Friends+me, currently in beta. The concept is that your source is Google+ and you can cross-post anything you publish on G+ to #Facebook, #Twitter and #LinkedIn. Both personal profiles and pages are supported, you automate at the same time your G+ profile as well as any page you administer.

The good thing is that it comes with quite a few settings for customising when and what's posted. You can set manually to which networks a post will be copied using hashtags or have some networks as defaults. You also have choices on how the post will be made and how it will or not link back to the original post. Finally, links posted through Friends+me on Twitter have support for Twitter Cards, so followers can have a preview of the linked post/URL.

The devil is in the details though. What really won me over to use Friends+me instead of Hootsuite for a site I manage was that links to pages on the website are actually posted as link-type posts on Facebook. Meanwhile, Hootsuite's automated posting to Facebook creates status-type posts which are less click-friendly.

+Friends+Me is now in beta and free. Some (really cheap) plans will be available in the next months (they are announced on the website but you can't purchase them yet - an interesting approach). Check it out! http://bit.ly/friendsme

Newton's playground: Javascript physics engines

This awesome animation is actually the recorded output of a real-time #Javascript-powered physics engine. There has been quite a lof of progress in this field lately using technologies like #canvas and #WebGL, here are some recent developments:

The "dragable/tearable cloth" demo above comes from lonely-pixel.com. Play with it live and get the code here http://bit.ly/15wyK0F There are more demos on the developer's website, like this "ball curve collision" http://bit.ly/1078otN (balls fall through the curves which you can re-arrange as you like :))

Then we go to Verlet-js http://bit.ly/XY0okC a simple (according to SubProtocol, the developer) Verlet integration physics engine written in Javascript by. Check out the "spider" demo
http://bit.ly/ZGWIy6 where you can push a spider around on it's web (yes, the spider moves around on it's own as well :))

Finally, CoffeePhysics (http://bit.ly/11XpGxF) by +Justin Windle. Yes, every bubble there moves around in a frantic manner :)  More experiments by Justin here http://bit.ly/XYfjeJ

Links via +Veljko Sekelj , +Lo Sauer and +Steve Mayne. Many thanks! :)

Blogger and the Holy Grail of unified comments

// So yesterday Google announced a further integration of Google+ comments and Blogger. If you enable the related setting, if your Blogger post is shared on G+, any comment on the G+ post with your post will also be shown in the page of the Blogger post in the comments section.

This is a Holy Grail for comments on Google+ for people like who use Google+ as a blogging platform, as you can have all (public) comments from re-shares on your original post both to read (if you have many re-shares usually you just don't follow discussion there) as well as respond to.

So this is a post written and first post on Blogger at mgiannopoulos.blogspot.com. I'm not sure where this will lead as not everything is peachy.

First of all, I've been looking for some good premium themes that would have the same look as my current setup at giannopoulos.net but have not found anything decent. Any suggestions here would be great.

The other issue I see is that, when you share a new post to G+ at the time of publishing (while you're on Blogger), you actually create a G+ post which contains a link to the blogger post. This mean that my current G+ followers, who were used to seeing my full posts (complete text and image) on their stream, will now see just a link (and perhaps some intro that I write while sharing). This is less compelling to click through.

On top of that, I would not be able to share a Blogger post on G+ communities without being marked a spammer :) Currently it is generally acceptable to share your own G+ post in a community since you're still keeping people on the platform and they can read the full post inline. See the screenshot above for a terrible "inception" effect :)

So as it is, I'm sceptical on whether this could work. My G+ audience is well, on G+. Sending them to Blogger in order to have all discussions in a single place could actually be counter-productive. Thoughts? :)


[Update] When someone replies directly on your Blogger post (not through a share), you get a notification on Google+ :)

Now this IS parallax!

// I'm not a big fan of parallax scrolling sites. Mainly because it is CPU-intensive which means that you will have people with a bad experience and by definition you are constrained to a small number of "pages" which means that you can only use it for small sites and you can't upgrade such a site easily (you will end up re-designing it). 

But this 2012 wish card mini-site of Soleil Noir is simply beautifully done: 
- Vertically scrolling that makes sense: the content is linear (you're supposed to read each page after the other) and extremely short so quick flipping through it is actually needed as opposed to clicking on a menu where the use pauses to think about what he needs to do
- Animations are not only part of the scroll but continue after you've reached a key point giving the impression of a "live page", an element of nature that you're there to experience 
- URL changes according to where you are and a navigation menu is on the right (for some implementations, these are details to be ignored as not overly needed)

See the site here http://bit.ly/Zt4srn
Got any good examples of parallax scrolling that parallax is just used because it's trendy? :) 

This is not how HTML and CSS should be used!

// Some fun coding by Peter Westendorp: "Tunnel vision 3D" with CSS. As Peter writes: "This is an experiment to demonstrate the power of CSS and modern browsers. This is not how HTML and CSS should be used." :D

See it live here http://bit.ly/10SvqbK

This is the Internet!

// Openly accessible data + open source development + open technologies = awesome :) 

The people at Teehan+Lax have developed a method to create timelapse videos using imagery from Google Street View. They call it Google Street View Hyperlapse and you can see the amazing video that you can produce as well, along with links to the source code here http://vimeo.com/63653873

Full size photo uploads: G+ winning the tech war on Facebook

// In the latest #googleplusupdate, you can now upload the full-sized photos and G+ will serve them accordingly: Initially you get a reduced (but great quality) version but you can zoon and pan to see more detail!

How to have this: To enable full-size desktop uploads, just visit your settings at https://www.google.com/settings/plus, and check "Upload my photos at full size." Afterwards, any files larger than 2048px will count towards your Google storage (up to 5GB free). Photo storage at 2048px or smaller remains free and unlimited.

Meanwhile, Facebook still can't keep up, probably not having enough servers/storage to handle better quality in their photos. See also this experiment by +Mike Elgan http://bit.ly/10y7JUH 

Finally, a reminder on how to zoom (try it on this 2448 x 3264 pixels photo from snowy Luxembourg :))
- use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out
- click and drag to pan right, left, up or down

Have fun!

Social media cross-posting with Fotostat

I've been expanding the number of social networks I use, almost like an addict lately :) So I've been looking for a way to administer my addiction in an easier way. I had an automation between G+, Twitter and my Wordpress blog (so I was only posting on G+) and additionally was cross-posting to Facebook and LinkedIn through Hootsuite.

Today I'm trying out Fotostat, a new service currently in beta for posting your photos (but also text, this post was written on fotostat) as well as gather statistics about them. To copy the service's description:
- Save time by scheduling your uploads to multiple social photography sites, blogs and merchant facilities.
- Discover how well each photo is performing by seeing all available statistics from each of your networks.
- Interact with your followers by commenting across all your sites from one easy to use location.

The service works very nicely: you first connect to your networks and your existing photos are imported to the service so you already have statistics on your content so far. You then can post new content, selecting each time to which networks you want to post to.

Currently supported are Google+ (Publishing to albums only, no post creation as yet.), Facebook, Flickr, 500px, Smugmug, Tumblr and WordPress. The effort is headed by Daniel Treadwell, developer of the G+ to WordPress plugin I have been using for over a year now, so I'm sure there are lots of improvements to come.

Try it out for free at http://fotost.at/

BP Imperial

A fun display font by George Triantafyllakos. Get it at http://www.backpacker.gr/font.asp?m=1&font=bp13

Just because you can: GUI icons with pure CSS

// Inspired by an elegant piece of CSS code by +Lea Verou, creating the WiFi code (see it here http://bit.ly/wificss), I searched for other examples of this and found this little gem: A demo of 84 icons created with just CSS by +Nicolas Gallagher.

Nicolas calls it's a "technical exercise" but given that this was done back in 2010 and support for the methods used is much wider now, the code should be working in all modern browsers. 

You can see it in action and dig into the code here http://bit.ly/css-gui-icons

Charts with Javascript: even more ways to kill Flash

// Javascript-powered chart solutions is a favorite topic of mine, so here are a few more options for you- NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) builds upon the powerful D3 library and currently supports 11 different interactive chart types

- Rickshaw (http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/) also built on D3, can be used for live-data time graphs with 4 customisable chart types

_ gRaphaël (http://g.raphaeljs.com/) is based on Raphaël and has 4 different chart types including a dot chart

- YUI charts (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/charts/) is part of the YUI library and supports 7 chart types

- Polychart.js (http://polychartjs.com/) has 5 chart types which can be combined.

Depending on your situation and needs any of this could work, but surely NVD3 stands out. For more on the topic, see here http://bit.ly/g-chart

Draft: cloud text-editing for any anything anywhere

// I've written about #Draft already a few days ago http://bit.ly/g-draft when it was "just" a web-based text #editor for #Dropboxand Google Drive with version control and collaboration features.But I need to write again as a #Chrome extension was released that redefined how you can use Draft. I'll just copy the developer's (+Nathan Kontny) description:

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News. Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text box will carry over). When you're done, there's a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from.

As I write this post on Draft, it's a much better experience of writing without all the noise of Google+'s interface. Highly recommended, get Draft here http://bit.ly/draft-chrome