RPX: Social Account Integration Made Easy
If you remember a while back, we said that integrating Facebook accounts with your blog was an evil worth fighting for… it still is, but RPX has made it a little easier for us. RPX is a social integration plugin for WordPress that allows your readers to sign into your site with their network of choice. If they have a Facebook, Twitter, Google, AOL, etc. account… they can sign into your site and comment. Not only does this plugin help us with the coveted Facebook integration; it adds potentially limitless sign in opportunities for your readers. By default, you can choose 6 different providers to integrate. If you want to upgrade to a paid account you can use 12 or more providers. For us, 6 was plenty. If you take a look at the sidebar to the right, you’ll notice that we’ve included a nice graphic of the sign in screen that shows you the different accounts you can use to comment. Click it. It will take you to our sign in page and from there you can securely sign into our site with your network of choice. Once signed in, you have full access to everything a “normal” user [...]
Personalization is awesome, try Gravatar
You may frequent blog websites and wonder how some users have avatars and others don’t. You want an avatar too, so you dig through your profile options but don’t find any way to upload that awesome photo of you from three years ago. What do you do? Well, in those instances, it’s pretty likely that the blogs are using Gravatars. Gravatars are “Globally Recognized Avatars” that will work on any website that accepts them. These days, you’ll find that most legit sites do. If they don’t, you should ask them to… it’s great software that takes very little to implement. How do you set up a Gravatar account? Browse your way over to Gravatar’s Website and set up an account. Just give them your email address, upload a picture, and then make sure you’re using that email address on your blog of choice when you comment. If you have multiple email addresses you’d like to use, great! They allow for primary and secondary email addresses — you can even assign a different picture to each. We have all of our email addresses set up so no matter what account we log in with, we’re animated. This is just another way [...]
What’s the point to social integration?
A new trend among internet companies is social integration. What is it? Well, if you’re running a company that allows people to connect with you on a social network, that’s social integration. It can take form in many ways. For instance, our blog automatically updates to Twitter… and our tweets automatically show up in our blog. It’s one way for us to stay more connected with our site — and our users can have to-the-minute updates from us if they subscribe to our Twitter feed. It doesn’t stop there, our website also allows you to log in and comment using your Facebook account information. You don’t have to sign up for “yet another” website in order to participate. Any good designer wants to make the end-user experience easier… they’re much more likely to retain traffic if their site is extremely well socially integrated. The little icons you see in every post allow you to share or bookmark each article depending on the service you’d like to do. You can email it, follow the comments RSS feed, put the article synopsis on your facebook profile, re-tweet it with Twitter, and share it on countless social networks that will connect you to [...]
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