Add Facebook Send Button plus Like Button to Blogspot Blogs

Credit to Jide Ogunsanya of www.ogbongeblog.com for this.

Few days back, Oriade Taiwo of NairaTechnology ,alerted members ofBloggersLab about the new facebook Send button. Knowing fully well, the advantages of having Facebook Social Plugins on my blog, I immediately rolled over to facebook developers page to get the code for the button and added it to my blog. In this post, I am going to show you how to add the Facebook Send button to your own blogger/blogspot blog, together with a Facebook Like button.

The Send Button allows your blog readers to easily send your content to their friends. People will have the option to send your URL in an inbox message to their Facebook friends, to the group wall of any Facebook group they are a member of, and as an email to any email address.

While the Like Button allows users to share your content with all of their friends, the Send Button allows them to send a private message to just a few friends.

The are two characteristics of the Send button:

• It auto-suggests groups and friends, so you don’t have to memorize friends’ and groups’ names.
• What you send to a friend or email will not appear on your friend’s Newsfeed or your wall. (What you post to a group on the other hand will appear on the wall of the group). 

Below is something similar to what you will see after clicking on the "Send" button.  

After sending the message, you will see "Message Sent" as in the picture below.

How Do I Get Started ?

Login to you Blogger dashboard and navigate to Design > Edit HTML and tickthe small "Expand Widget Templates" box. Using "CTRL+F", search for the code <data:post.body/>  and paste the "comment form code" highlighted below, directly above or directly below <data:post.body/>  and save the template.

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like layout="standard" show_faces="false" width="350" send="true" action="like" colorscheme="light"></fb:like> 

What If I already have a Facebook Like button on my blog?

If you already have the Facebook Like or Recommendation button on your blog, you don't need to add the code above to your html. All you just have to do, is to find the code above and add send="true" to it. Then, save your template. To find this code easily, just use CTR+F to find fb:like.

That's all. 

I hope it works for you.

Improve Your Account with 4 Facebook Applications

Like a lot of you, I’ve largely outgrown my trust for Facebook applications. The truth is, most of these really are ‘just for fun’, which means you have to wade through spam, survey schemes and dysfunctional applications to find your way to something useful.

There are more than enough of these useful Facebook applications though, and you’re missing out on a lot of the fun if you think it isn’t worth your time.

Here are four useful Facebook applications that actually improve your account.

 PageRage Facebook Themes

It’s a huge plus that Facebook doesn’t offer graphical configuration like MySpace — we all know how that turned out. Facebook looks slick, clean, but it might just not be your thing. An all-round user friendly situation would be to customize how Facebook looks for you. That’s what we call a win-win solution.

PageRage allow you to do this, using a Firefox add-on and Facebook application; you’ll need both of these for it to work. Choose one of many Facebook skins you like from the PageRage gallery, and you’re all set. Mind you, this will only affect how you view Facebook on yourcomputer.

Docs for Facebook

Facebook recently announced Docs, a hybrid between Facebook and Microsoft Fusion to share documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Facebook. It’s no Google Docs or Microsoft Office replacement yet, but it goes a long way.

 In the Docs application, you’ll be able to skim popular reads, browse your own and friends’ files, or upload new documents. Besides uploading or creating a new document, you can also create interactive files that use Facebook data; resumes, charts based on friends’ data and photo slideshows. This is where the Facebook integration really pays off.

 Because the application is really just a Facebook front-end for the new Docs.com website, Facebook will redirect you when actually opening or creating a new document. Although full integration of the word editor (seen above) is still a thing of the future, other Facebook options are present on the Docs site, like posting a document to your Facebook wall.

Twitter Tab

Facebook and Twitter are often regarded as two great battling social media sites, but why should they; the two services couldn’t be more different and it’s only sensible (from a social media aspect) to pay attention to both.

 The Twitter Tab application allows you to keep an eye on both from one website. In fact, you can monitor up to eight different Twitter accounts and customize the theme to match your Facebook page.

RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti is an entirely different kind of amazing. It’s especially useful if you host your own blog or website and have an RSS feed. With the ease of subscribing to a feed, you can start publishing posts to your Facebook. Mind, you can also use RSS Graffiti to post from sites like Flickr, Twitter, or Yahoo! Meme — you just need a valid RSS feed.

 Setting up the application hardly takes a minute and you can start adding feeds right away. The application will prompt you for a feed name and URL by default, but you can configure a whole range of more advanced settings, including filtering, transforming the feed, and scheduling your updates.