Creation-1

Our Friend and client Miles Mosley has just joined Tumblr. Follow Him! It will be the official image gallery for all things Miles Mosley. We made a few minor customizations to the popular “Minimalist Theme” on Tumblr.

Jenty in the newly formed country of South Sudan needed a small loan to buy beans and oil that she sells at a stand in Yambio, South Sudan.  We wish her the best of luck as her loan has now been 100% funded!

A project we recently supported on Kickstarter just reached 100% funding!  The Productive is a Co-Working space in NYC for animators. We think the concept of working together with your peers in an open environment can only lead to great things. We hope to see out a project like this someday ourselves. If you are in NY and interested in The Productive and what they are all about check out their website http://theproductivenyc.com

Creation-1 will be closed between December 23 and January 1st for holiday break.  We will only be checking email periodically.  Feel free to call us with any emergencies and we will be happy to help you.  Happy Holidays!

We just launched http://Clearly-Balanced.com – a company offering professional organizing services to the greater Seattle area.  The site is a custom design powered by WordPress.

We have once again utilized Kiva to contribute to a promising entrepreneur.  This time it’s Araceli in Mexico who is using her loan to purchase stock for her clothing store. Kiva is full of so many entrepreneurial stories from around the world.  I highly recommend browsing the site and contributing to better the lives of others.  It may just brighten your day, ya never know!

We worked with the talented team at Square Tomato in Seattle to develop this snazzy holiday campaign site for The Shops at The Bravern in Bellevue, WA.  We developed some really fun jQuery effects around their design to spice things up and add some interactivity.  It’s amazing what you can do now without Flash!  Building this site resulted in my article about Facebook Open Graph which you can see was used quite effectively on this site.  Take a look for yourself here.

The Adventure Project has once again caught our eye. This time with their holiday stove campaign.  There are .5 million people still living in tents after the earthquake.  These stoves will provide some much needed help for the people to cook their own food and stay warm at night.  For more information and donation info go to The Adventure Project

We just finished the web development and launch of the IN-NW Conference website.  We had a little fun with the design supplied by 206Inc and added lots of fun jQuery effects like the sliding panels and pop-up effects on the speakers.  Creation-1 will be one of the main event sponsors.  Check the details here and see ya in February!

We recently had quite the experience battle with Facebook Open Graph Protocol.  From here on out we will refer to it as OGP.

Okay so what is it?

Well, to make a long answer as short as possible, OGP is a series of tags you can use in the metadata of your web pages to help push info to Facebook and make sharing more seamless between your website and Facebook.

How will I use it?

Most people use OGP tags on their website and blog posts to tell Facebook what descriptions, titles, and images to use when a user shares your content on Facebook.  There are many other advanced ways of pushing other OGP tags to Facebook.  You can learn here about more advanced uses: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How do I implement Open Graph Tags?

If you are working in a CMS like WordPress, don’t bother entering your tags manually.  There are plenty of plugins to help you out with this.  If you need to enter the tags manually it’s pretty easy.  Go here and paste in the tags above the </head> tag in the HTML of your page.  Then just make sure to edit the metadata appropriately for your URL and info.

How do I check my work?

To make sure Facebook is reading your OGP tags go to the Facebook URL Linter and enter the URL of the page you entered the tags on.  The URL linter will catch any errors in your metadata and display the data you are pushing to Facebook.  Edit the OGP tags so that no erorrs are returned on the URL linter.

What else should I know?

• You need a unique URL to share an item on Facebook.  If you have a slideshow that does not display unique URL’s for each item, you cannot share slides from your slideshow.
• Keep in mind when you are testing your work that the title becomes fixed after you share something 50 times. So, if you are testing a URL too much and are not seeing any changes, that’s why.
• Also, sometimes the URL linter has to refresh its’ cache so don’t be impatient.  If you change something, and it’s not displaying in the URL linter, check your work.  If you are sure you did everything right, wait.  Log in tomorrow and enter the URL again.  Everything should be fine.

I would love to hear about your experience with Facebook Open Graph Tags.  Do you have any tips of your own to add?