Ian McKendrick's SuperBlog

New Website For The Cambridge Biomedical Campus

Ian McKendrick — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:36:52 +0000

New Website For The Cambridge Biomedical Campus

To promote their new facilities being built over the next 10 years the Cambridge Biomedical Campus wanted to introduce a series of micro websites highlighting a selection of their tenants, and the research being conducted by them

Their end goal was to have a fully operable Content Management System that they could easily use to regularly keep their sites content fresh with new information as it emerged. They also wanted to fully integrate each site with social media applications that enabled site visitors to share the information being published through various social networks such as Twitter, FaceBook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

The focus of the work was not only to give their visitors personal insight into the great work being conducted by their tenants at the campus, but also to highlight why the Cambridge Biomedical Campus’ exceptional working environment and real estate means that it should be the location of choice for any medical or scientific research business wishing to conduct their business. They also wanted to demonstrate to research organisations the importance of being located in Cambridge due the special culture and environment that it has to offer.

During the early stages of the project The Cambridge Biomedical Campus team were so impressed with the SuperBlog’s ease of use that they decided to change the scope of the project to include a complete rebuild of their main website utilising our SuperBlog II platform.

This project is still ongoing as we fully incorporate the social media aspects and implement a robust social media strategy and training for all of the research centre staff, and for all of the other organisations involved.

Training in London

Ian McKendrick — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:28:10 +0000

Social Media Strategy Training Course

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Social Media Security Training

Ian McKendrick — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:35:56 +0000

Corporate Social Media Security Training for all staff

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Protecting Your Privacy When Uploading Photos

Ian McKendrick — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:19:58 +0000

The problem with photo image meta data

Today’s smart phones and digital cameras store information about the photos, hidden inside the digital images. In addition to the images technical properties such as dimensions and bit depth, cameras can write more personally identifiable information such camera serial numbers, the date and time the photos were taken and so on. In fact some images even store information such as the photographers address or the GPS location of where the image was taken.

How to see the data that’s been stored in an image

On a Windows system you can view your photos meta information in the “Details” tab of the “Properties” menu.

By removing the meta information before uploading your photos you can help to protect your privacy. The tools I am going to show you do not alter the quality of your photos, but help you to remove information that you do not inadvertently wish to share.

If you are planning to share your personal photographs over email or on a public website, such as a blog, or maybe on other social networks then it may sometimes make sense to remove the camera data, and in particular the GPS location information from the images before putting them online for everyone to see.

Your organisation must protect your contributors

If you run a business (or an organisation such as a charity, school, club or a magazine for example) where your customers, fans or followers contribute photographs for you to publish on any of your sites or social networks then you should be protecting their personal information by making sure you remove any photo meta-data from the images before you upload them. A good example of this would be a school, or club where parents contribute photographs of a birthday party, or an event that took place at a pupils home etc.

I have listed below a selection of applications that can help you remove this data, together with some simple to follow instructions.

QuickFix application

There is a free Windows utility called QuickFix which can help you with this.

Just simply drag and drop the photographs into the QuickFix window and click the Clean Metadata button to remove all of the identifiable information from the photographs. The application creates a new copy of the image and will not overwrite your original photographs. QuickFix will not only delete the EXIF data and the GPS location information from your photographs but also the IPTC and XMP tags which may have been added by your photo editing application.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools

Microsoft also offers a free utility called Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 that you may use to edit as well as delete common metadata from digital photographs including the GPS location should you wish.

Using Windows Explorer

Here is an an alternative way to remove EXIF Information (if all the photographs are in one folder) Believe it or not you can easily remove the EXIF data from one or more of these photographs using Windows Explorer itself without requiring any additional software.

All you need to do is to select all of the image files, then right click your selection and choose “Properties” Now click the “Details” tab and click on the “Remove Properties and Personal Information” link. The next screen will give you an option to remove the various metadata that is embedded inside the pictures. Watch the following video to see how simply this can be done.

Next Steps

If you have any tips (or stories to share where photo meta data has caused an issue) the please let us know in the comments below. Thank you

How To Set Up Google+ Add To Circles Plugin On Your WordPress Blog Step By Step

Ian McKendrick — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:25:54 +0000

With Google Plus seemingly taking over the internet as millions flock to try it out, many bloggers are now looking for a simple way to integrate Google+ into their blogs.

After trawling the internet for a suitable plugin, and experimenting with the many widgets, plugins and pieces of code that I found, I finally unearthed a WordPress plugin that was quick to install, simple to use, looks pretty cool, and works a treat.

It’s a neat little plugin for WordPress called Googlecard and it enables your blog visitors to easily add you to their Google+ Circles. It’s a widget that you can use in your sidebar, it fetches your Google Plus profile picture and lists underneath it how many Circles your Google+ profile is listed in. There’s even a nice little button that visitors can click to add your Google + profile into their own Circles and begin following you.

Take a look in the sidebar on my blog here you’ll see the plugin in action and you can test it for yourself, go on, try it out by clicking the button to add me to your circles!

Follow the step by step walkthrough below to learn how to install the Google+ widget in your own blog.

Step by step installation instructions:

Download the plugin from Google+ Devs website Here> and save the zipfile to somewhere where you can easily find it again on your computer. (You may have to right click the Download link and select “Save Link As” or “Save Target As” – It depends on your browser)

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Log into your WordPress blog dashboard, open Plugins / Add new plugin.

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Select Upload, click the Browse button, navigate to where you downloaded the zip file, select the file and click the Install Now button.

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After the plugin uploads and installs, click Activate to activate the plugin.

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Once the Plugin is installed and activated, navigate to Appearance / widgets in the WordPress dashboard

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Drag the Googlecard widget to where you would like it to appear in your WordPress sidebar

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Entering your Google+ settings into the Googlecard widget:

Twirl open the widget box by clicking the little arrow
Update the Title that will appear above the widget in your sidebar
Enter your Google Plus ID number (instructions for finding your Google Plus ID number are below)
Click Save to save the updated settings and you’re good to go!

Click to Enlarge

Finally, click your Site Title at the top of your dashboard to view the results of your handy-work…

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…and you should see the new Googlecard plugin in all its glory in your sidebar!

Update September 2011

A good alternative is here: http://widgetsplus.com/
Pop the resulting code into a text widget in your sidebar and you’re good to go!

How to locate your Google+ ID

Here’s how you can find out your Google Plus ID. Log into Google+ and click on your profile picture. Doing this opens up your public profile and you can find your ID by looking for the 21 digit number in the address bar at the top of your browser. See the image below where I’ve highlighted my Google+ ID number, you will find your own ID number in the same place when viewing your public profile online.

Hope this all helps!

So what are you going to do with Google+? Is it going to make a big difference to how you manage your social networking activities? Is it going to replace Twitter or FaceBook for you? We’d love to know, so please give us your feedback in the comments below.