Pinterest gives you the basic code to add their nice “Pin It” button to your website.. but to add to WordPress, with all of its dynamic-ness, takes a little extra work. I have a photo-a-day site that I wanted to make “Pin-able”, so here’s how that works, with the WP stuff bolded.

<div id=”pinterest-button-for-wordpress”>
<a href=”http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&media=<?php if (has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ): ?>
<?php $image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), ‘single-post-thumbnail’ ); ?>
<?php echo $image[0]; ?>
<?php endif; ?>&description=<?php the_title(); ?>” class=”pin-it-button” count-layout=”horizontal”>Pin It</a>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js”></script>
</div>

Great article on how to start using CSS3 animations from Tuts+ .

via CSS3 Transitions And Transforms From Scratch.

If you have any interest in learning or brushing up on HTML/CSS, here’s a terrific, FREE resource – honestly, it’s better than any book or class that I’ve seen for this purpose.

http://learncss.tutsplus.com/

More info:

30 Days to Learn HTML and CSS is a thirty-day video course designed to be completed over one month. Veteran web developer and trainer Jeffrey Way will take you through a new topic each day, giving you the building blocks you need to eventually code an entire website based on a PSD design.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn HTML and CSS, but either didn’t have the time, didn’t know where to start, or didn’t quite ‘get it’, we’re pretty sure you’re going to love this free course. All you need to give us in return is 10 minutes a day to go through each video and build your knowledge.

It’s a great chance to learn something new for just 10-15 minutes a day.

This is your tech conscience speaking. It is time to backup your data. Ok, you should probably change your Brita filter, and you probably need to get an oil change. But most importantly.. you need to backup your data.

There has never been a better time to backup your computer’s data. Really – you can do it all for free, almost without ANY thought. This is especially important if you have a laptop, which many folks do – the reason being, you have one small hard drive, and that’s it. DO NOT RELY on Windows “system restore” or “repair” functions.. if the hard drive has errors, these “features” are useless – and this is almost always the case. I have an external drive on my computer at home – where I backup all data.. but that’s really not enough (if say, your computer is hit by lightning).

Enter.. the Internet.

UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS

Do not rely on your computer as the sole repository for photos and videos. Save them online somewhere, so if you lose your local data, you can get it back. Personally, I pay for Smugmug. I feel it is worth every cent for their superior photo presentation, as well as the backup factor. For a few bucks more you can upload videos, as well. Don’t take many photos? Save them anyway. Use Google Picasa to organize them locally, AND keep them online via Picasa Web Albums. The software does it all for you – and its free. You can adjust privacy settings as well.

Not all “photo sites” will give you your photos back. Don’t bother relying on sites like Snapfish or Kodak galleries.. and definitely do not expect Facebook to care if you lose your data – it does not pretend to be any form of backup or library for you, so don’t expect to get anything back from them.

BACKUP YOUR DOCUMENTS

Whether they are Microsoft Office docs, or your Tax records..  you might save them in an organized file locally. But if something goes wrong? Your organization skills don’t mean squat. You don’t have to pay to back these up, but you might have to think a bit.

1. Google Docs - an invaluable “cloud” tool. You can upload all common document types, such as Word, Excel, PDF, etc. To make things better, say you have a “budget spreadsheet”.. load that to Google Docs, and you never have to worry about what version is the latest – the one in Docs is THE ONE. There’s revision history, so you can always go back to a previous edit. Further, you can collaborate on these files – share with certain people – let them see, or edit, right online. Check out some of the documentation. Did I mention that it is free? Google Docs is almost a complete replacement for Microsoft Office – and I do everything I can to create a Google Doc instead of a Microsoft doc which will inevitably get out of date at some point. You can access Google Docs from anywhere – even your phone. You get 1Gig free, which goes a looong way for regular documents. Google happily will accept money for more storage as well, at very affordable prices.
2. Dropbox is another fantastic “cloud” service. Think of the “My Documents” folder on your desktop.. accessible anywhere you go. Dropbox “syncs” a folder on your computer (where you can create subfolders) to the “cloud” automatically. Every time you add or save a file, it syncs it for you. You can share files as well – and even view your history (versions, etc) on Dropbox.com . A small download and some minor configuration is required to get it going. A small workflow change is needed, to ensure you save your files in the right place, so they are sync’d – but it is worth this very minor effort. The service gives you 2Gig’s free, and you can get 250MB for every person you refer (yes, the links above are referral links ). If you need even more storage, you can pay for tiered levels.

Both of these services are free (to certain limits) and will allow you to fully recover all saved data in case of emergency.

MUSIC TO THE CLOUDS

Your music collection is probably quite sizable, curated, and deeply cherished. Even it if is only one of those adjectives, SAVE it! Like I said at the beginning, there has never been a better time to backup your data.. and music is one of the biggest winners here – for free of course. iTunes has us all completely reliant on it locally, but does it help when your hard drive blows up? No. Maybe you can get your purchases back, but what about all the CDs you ripped, and those songs you acquired years ago from “other” pathways? Enter two behemoths – Google (again!) and Amazon.

1. Google Music – Google is quietly making a big play in the music world – with this service, Google will backup your entire music collection (up to 20,000 songs it says), and keep it in sync (with a small desktop client). It also lets you discover and add tons of free music, with the help of their Magnifier blog. You can then play your music on any computer – free. With a fancy smartphone, you can even stream your Google Music wherever you have service. The only catch – you need to request an invite.. so go do that NOW.
2. Amazon Cloud Drive and Player - Amazon is very busy these days. They have their own MP3 store to compete with Apple’s iTunes, and I must say it’s great. You can browse, sample and purchase songs right from your web browser and your mobile device. To one-up everyone else, Amazon lets you save those songs to the “cloud” – free. Yes, you can download them anywhere – but more importantly you won’t lose them. The cherry on top – much like Google, Amazon will let you upload your music collection as well. You get 5Gig’s free (about 1000 songs) – and can pay for more. Like Google again, you can play your music in any browser on any computer, as well as on fancy smartphones. I should note, the Amazon service does allow you to upload ANY documents – so it technically spans all of the services I mention here.

EMAIL

Move. To. Gmail. Do it – stop with the procrastination.. DO IT. Again, universal email access, fantastic features, and you won’t have to delete anything. Yes, there’s a little hassle in changing your address – but that is a good time to clean out the old address book. Stop relying on clunky Outlook and crummy online services from Hotmail and Comcast. If you must use Outlook, you can still it with Gmail – but really, there’s no need. Email should not be clunky. Google knows it.

There you have it. I only touched lightly on most of this, and look how long the post is. Dang. The main point here – BE PROACTIVE about backing up.. like, right NOW. With very small investments of time, you can ensure minimal loss in case of a disk failure. The costs are slim to none – and you get benefits of easier access as well.

While you are at it.. consider writing down your passwords. Put them in your wallet or somewhere safe.

My newest project is a photo-a-day site – to which I added a Facebook Like button, Google + button, and a Tweet button. I ran into some issues with the FB Like button in that it would pull the wrong image every time someone clicked it. I found this great write-up on how to fix it:

How to Add Facebook Open Graph Meta Data in WordPress Themes.

What I like about the solution is that the code is simply added to your functions.php file – so no need to add another plugin. The main fix is to add new Meta tags to the site, but in order for them to update properly some code is necessary (which is in the tutorial above). Good stuff!

Looking to show off just a few photos? Like your own photo-a-day site? Check out this free minimalist photography theme – very sharp. Now live on my new project at www.yettas.com.

mmminimal Free WordPress Themes | mmminimal.

Google’s ’+1′ button is the latest button everyone should have on their site. Their latest endeavor is Google Plus – which is slowly uniting all of Google’s social products. It is strongly targeting Facebook –  the ‘+1′ button can be likened to FB’s ‘like’ button. I must admit, I am liking it more than Facebook so far.

However, there is something interesting about the +1 button’s purpose – they are not replacing “buzz”, which is more like Facebook’s “share”.

Buzz buttons are used for starting conversations about interesting web content (“Hey guys, what do you think about this news story?”). +1 buttons recommend web content to people in the context of search results (“Peng +1’d this page”), and +1′s from social connections can help improve the relevance of the results you see in Google Search. You can use the +1 button, or the Buzz button, or both—pick what’s right for your content.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

I’m finding that the standard FB “like” button is picking random images on my new project.. Looks like there are some great work arounds.

via Let Facebook “Like” button pick the right image!.

When you are a business owner, life is always moving.. and managing all of your Social networks can be a little daunting. Fortunately, there are shortcuts to save a little time, such as posting a message to Facebook automatically posting to Twitter. Facebook has a good explanation of how to hook up its Pages with Twitter, surprisingly.  In the explanation:

If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be [is] available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

Recently Facebook revamped a commenting system, which can replace that of your current blog’s. Adding Facebook Comments to your site is not an overly difficult process – and certainly adds some value. For instance – spammers will have trouble, considering you have to be a real person to be on Facebook (in theory). It also adds huge social value – as comments can appear in FB as well as on your site. It also adds “like” functionality inherently – pretty nice.

What is NOT so nice – the scripts that are pulled in to activate the functionality will break your Lightbox plugins. These are the ones that show off images in a pleasant overlay when you click on them – for standalone posts as well as other plugins such as NextGen gallery.

Fortunately, there’s a solution. An evolution of Lightbox – called Colorbox – seems unaffected by the Facebook factor.  What. A. Relief.

Some links:

• Facebook Comments for WordPress – enables Facebook Comments on your WordPress blog
• JQuery Colorbox – the next generation of Lightbox, compatible with FB Comments