I upgraded the website today and the major "enhancement" is the addition of the social media links for following updates to the website and programs on Twitter (@coder_for_life) and Facebook (Coder for Life). I hope to increase the presence of these features over the entire website, including "liking" articles. I already have gone one step in the right direction with this an have added Open Graph tags on every page (although the required "og:image" and recommended "og:description" are not available for non-project pages yet).

Adding the Social Media

Twitter was a piece of cake! I just went to http://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton and filled out the form, copy+paste, and then did some style tweaking.

Facebook was much more difficult. They also have a simple fill out form at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box but the box is much more involved and forces a square black box (for dark theme) and a weird gray border on some of the sides. Needless to say this looked ugly, especially since they forced the Coder for Life logo in there without transparency and oddly squished. So I spent quite a bit of time and found out how to completely tweak it to my liking, and now it functions as nicely as the Twitter box.

What will be coming?

I am hoping to expand the usage of the social media quite a bit, and the biggest target is the boot-skin sharing system. I was originally at a loss for how to make it as neat as I wanted it to be, but now that I know that Facebook can provide a rating system (total number of likes) and a comment system for each entry in the boot-skin system I think that I can make a pretty cool system without an excessive amount of effort. Stay tuned!