XtremelySocial.com » Announcements

XtremelySocial Site Now Mobile Optimized

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:03:40 +0000

I have finally rolled out a new fully-responsive website theme that is optimized for both desktop and mobile browsing. The new site automatically reformats itself based on the width of the browser or mobile device. So it should look great whether you are accessing it with an iPhone, iPad, Android, or Windows Mobile device.

The full site content is available now on mobile devices. Previously, the full-width site would display on the iPad and a special “smartphone” theme was used for phones. That smartphone theme didn’t look similar to the full website and didn’t display all the content of the site. So the site now provides a much better experience for mobile devices, while still being optimized for desktop and laptop browsers as well.

I also wanted to provide a more modern look to the site. Sites these days are not only fully responsive, but provide a cleaner, simpler look with more “whitespace” between the various pieces of content. If you look at our home page, for example, you’ll see how its still graphically rich but a much cleaner look.

For now, I have left the top navigation, right sidebar content, and footers essentially the same as the old site. This was done intentionally so users wouldn’t be so completely disoriented by the new site design. However, over time I will be the footers and perhaps eliminating the right sidebars altogether and using the extra space to format the page content itself in two columns.

Please feel free to let us know how you like the new site. Please note that the Facebook Friends and Facebook News Stream pages are driven by our XtremelySocial app on Facebook and it hasn’t yet been optimized for mobile. However, if you run into any formatting issues with anything else on the site, please let us know.

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Our Facebook Apps Now Support SSL Secure Browsing

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:35:35 +0000

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile was hacked, Facebook has been pushing users toward using secure browsing via SSL. While only a small number of users have made the switch so far, Facebook will be requiring it in the next couple of months.

Now that we have rolled out banner ads on our My Info and Welcome Tab applications (to page admins only, not to viewers of the pages), we have a few cents a day coming in to help us pay the annual fee for an SSL certificate. So we are now supporting SSL throughout all of our Facebook applications. This means My Greetings, My Places, and My Status also have full SSL support.

This means you can turn on Facebook’s secure browsing preference and seamlessly use our Facebook apps without having to switch out of secure mode. While none of our apps send any sensitive data, it was annoying to our users to have to switch back and forth between secure and unsecured modes.

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PalmZone.net: PalmZone.net Wants YOU to Take Over or Purchase the Site!

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:00:57 +0000

We don’t have time to maintain the site anymore with our full-time day job and our XtremelySocial.com website and Facebook applications. We’d be happy to let someone take over the site in terms of publishing articles and updating content. Or if someone wants to the purchase the site, we’d be happy to sell it as well. Please contact webmaster at palmzone dot net if you are interested or know someone who might be.

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How to Make an Awesome Maintenance Mode Screen for WordPress

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:55:28 +0000

Whenever you update your WordPress site to a new version or mass update multiple plugins at the same time, WordPress automatically places your site in “maintenance mode”. In this tutorial, I’ll show you to how to easily make an awesome “theme” that gets displayed instead of the blank white page that just says the site is undergoing maintenance.

The best part about this is that its all automatically handled by WordPress and they have already built in a “hook” to easily do this. If WordPress finds a file called maintenance.php in your /wp-content directory, it will use that file instead of the default blank white page.

The key thing to note is that while your site is in maintenance mode, you can’t be sure that you will have access to the traditional WordPress theme template tags or functions, such as bloginfo(‘name’) or bloginfo(‘description’) or theme “options” fields that configure the various aspects of a theme. So you’ll need to “hard code” your site name, description, the text that displays, the URL’s to image and links.

If you are good with HTML, you can code up whatever you’d like. However, the easiest way to do this is to install a theme that you like, configure it, display it in your browser and then “view source” to grab the HTML code. You’ll want to grab the full HTML from the top tag through the bottom tag. This needs to be a fully-functional standalone HTML page. It really is just about that simple.

The only thing you need to do beyond grabbing the HTML code is to add the following to the maintenance.php file.

At the very top, add the following code. This code will tell the search engines that your site is only temporarily unavailable and to try back in 10 minutes.

/* DON’T CHANGE THIS – IT TELLS SEARCH ENGINES THE SITE IS ONLY TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE */
$protocol = $_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"];
if ( ‘HTTP/1.1′ != $protocol && ‘HTTP/1.0′ != $protocol )
$protocol = ‘HTTP/1.0′;header( “$protocol 503 Service Unavailable”, true, 503 );
header( ‘Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8′ );
header( ‘Retry-After: 600′ );
/* END DON’T CHANGE THIS */
?>

At the very bottom of the file, add the following line. Since WordPress is including this file into its program that handles the upgrade, its important that you tell WordPress to drop out of this section of the code when its done displaying this maintenance mode page.

/* DON’T CHANGE THIS – IT PASSES CONTROL BACK TO THE WORDPRESS UPGRADE ROUTINE */
die();
/* END DON’T CHANGE THIS */
?>

Here is a screenshot of the page that I’ve created for XtremelySocial.com.

Here is a link to view the Maintenance Mode Screen for XtremelySocial.com. You can cut and paste the HTML from that page if you’d like to use it as a starting point, but make sure you install the ice-breaker theme from CustomTheme.com that it is based on. My page needs the images, and css from that theme to work.

There are some really great “under construction” WordPress themes that you can use to generate your initial HTML code and paste it into your maintenance.php file. Check out the article Top Themes and Plugins for Under Construction WordPress Blogs from techcats.net.

Update 5/26/10: Note that this seems to only work in WordPress 3.0. Older versions don’t seem to handle automatically placing your site in maintenance mode properly. The code is there to do it, but it doesn’t seem to work. If anyone has a quick fix, let me know. If I find a fix I’ll post it here.

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Posting Site Comments Back to Facebook Now Fixed

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:06:38 +0000

Facebook changed the way developers have to publish to user’s “stream”, so I had to update the code here on XtremelySocial.com to get comment publishing to Facebook working again. Please feel free to comment at will!

If you don’t have a particular article in mind that you want to comment on, feel free to use our Community Wall. Its a wall for this site, much like a Facebook page wall.

As always, please let me know if something isn’t working correctly on the site by emailing web master at xtremely social dot com.

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My Status: New Facebook Profile Publisher

Tim Nicholson — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:15:55 +0000

I’m very excited to announce that you can now use My Status to update your Facebook and Twitter status from within the built-in Facebook profile publisher. My Status can now be used on your Facebook home page or profile, just like how you’d update your status with the pre-built Facebook publisher.

Look for the new My Status icon on your publisher. If you don’t see it, then click the drop-down arrow in the publisher and you should be able to select it. What’s nice is that after you use My Status to update your status, the icon will be visible for more easily selecting it the next time.

Note that if you haven’t already set up your Twitter User ID and Password, you’ll need to do that from the main My Status home page. Facebook won’t let us collect a password in the publisher, which I suppose is a good thing. So you’ll need to configure your Twitter credentials first and then you can use the Publisher. I’ve provided a link in the publisher to make it easy.

As always, please let us know if you run into any issues. Please use the My Status About/Support Page or you can use my email address which is on the XtremelySocial.com About Us page.

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My Greetings: Application Dashboard Support Rollout

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:33:56 +0000

I have now started to update My Greetings with support for the brand new Facebook “Application Dashboard” that was released in part this month. The main difference you’ll notice at this point is that when someone sends you a greeting, you’ll see a counter show up on your Facebook home page next to the My Greetings application.

I’ve also updated the links in your My Greetings history and friend birthday lists to link directly to that person’s profile publisher with My Greetings already loaded. This makes it much easier to quickly send a greeting to a friend, especially considering that still can’t send greetings directly from the My Greetings home page. I’ll be working on getting that fixed after updating the application to more fully support the Applications Dashboard.

The Applications Dashboard is supposed to allow for three kinds of “news and activity” related postings. I have implemented the code for two of them, but their are serious bugs in the Facebook developer API’s that are effecting all applications such that these news/activity items do not actually show up in the dashboard. Facebook is aware of these issues and is supposedly working on a fix.

Since I’ve already put the code in place, as soon as Facebook fixes the issue with them not displaying, you should immediately start to see the following:

1. You should see a message under the My Greetings icon in the dashboard informing you that you have received a greeting from a friend.

2. When viewing the applications that your friends are using in the dashboard, you should see a message about what greetings they have sent or received.

The third type of news item in the Dashboard are global application messages. I have not yet implemented that, but plan to do so at some point. For now I’m still displaying application announcements on the My Greetings home page and you should also still be receiving them in your Facebook news stream under “Updates”, if you have become a fan of My Greetings.

Please check out the related articles below for more information about the new Facebook home page and apps and games dashboards.

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Enhanced Facebook Stream & Wall Pages

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:07:07 +0000

I am happy to announce that we have made some nice enhancements and fixed some issues with displaying your Facebook stream and friend’s walls here on XtremelySocial.com.

Facebook updated their stream API’s yet again which broke the individual wall pages. Only public posts were being displayed even if you were friends with that person. That issue is now fixed.

We also fixed an issue where posts with multiple images were not being displayed properly. These posts will now display all the images. We also added the image caption text.

We changed all the Facebook links throughout user profile pages, walls, and activity stream to launch Facebook in a new tab/window. Each click will launch in the same tab, though, so you won’t have to deal with a ton of browser windows opening up.

We made several enhancements to the individual post links as well. We increased the font size and now display the name of the application that was used to post the item with a link to that application. We also are now displaying the “action link”, which is the application-specific link to help out your mafia, see what they said, take the poll, or whatever.

We also added just a bit of space between the post comments to separate them a bit and have them look more like they do on Facebook.

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PalmZone.net: PalmZone.net Forums Now Open to all Registered Users

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:32:28 +0000

The PalmZone.net forums are now back up and running for registered users. Feel free to post new topics and reply to posts as you previously were able to. We have implemented methods to prevent automated SPAM from spambots.We have banned all known SPAMMERS that are registered users to prevent them from posting. We have also implemented a new mechanism to prevent the bots from automatically posting SPAM. When you login or register, you will now be asked a simple question that any person will know the answer to, but the SPAM BOTS won’t. WE have the ability to fine-tune these questions to ensure that the bots are stopped.

Please let us know in the comments or post in the forums if you find any new SPAM appearing and we’ll take care of it ASAP. Thanks to our loyal (human) readers for putting up with this mess. We appreciate your patience!

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XtremelySocial Launches Social Networking News

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:29:40 +0000

We are happy to announce that we are now publishing news about the social networking industry on our website. We are hand-picking the best articles about social networking from around the Web. We are covering news and trends with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other important news that effects the social networking community.

We are NOT just automatically pulling news feeds. We believe that would be of little value and would lead to actually more “noise” rather than less. Our intent is to comb all the best social networking sites and selectively choose articles that we believe are valuable to our readers.

Because these news articles were written by other authors on other websites, we are leaving the full articles in tact, including their ads. We absolutely believe that the original authors and websites should benefit from their own advertising around the content that they own.

In order to keep a clean layout to the site, we have moved Our Facebook Apps and Our Websites pages underneath the About Us page. We have also cleanly segregated Our News from the Social News categories.

We hope you enjoy this new service we are providing and hope to get some good discussions going on our website. As always, you can choose to publish your comments here back to Facebook. We plan to actively participate in the discussions that take place here around these articles.

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PalmZone.net: PalmZone.net Forums Now Read-Only Due to SPAM! – UPDATE:NOW FIXED

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:10:57 +0000

UPDATE: THIS IS NOW FIXED! Spammers have been banned and new anti-spam measures have been put in place. See the related article below.

This is truly a sad day, but the SPAM in our forums has gotten so out of control that we have set all of the forums to read-only mode. You can still search and view all topics and posts, but you won’t be able to submit or reply to posts.

For now, all EXISTING registered users are still able to post comments on news articles and in the PDA Guides. All new site members will have their comments moderated until we feel they should be allowed to comment without moderation.

We will be looking into ways that we can combat this SPAM and hope to be able to bring the forums back online for all registered users in the future.Our new website, http://xtremelysocial.com uses the built-in anti-SPAM features in WordPress. We’d love to migrate PalmZone.net to WordPress, but we just don’t know if there is enough demand for the site.

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New Community and Facebook Features

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:05:25 +0000

XtemelySocial.com is all about community! You can log into our website with your Facebook login information and see which of your friends are members of our site, what comments they are making on our articles, and invite your Facebook friends to check out our site. Now you can even view your full Facebook friend activity stream on our site.

Site Members – See which Facebook friends are using our site as well as who are all the members of our website.
Member Profiles – Each site member has a profile that pulls information from both this site and Facebook. When you click on a user’s profile picture, you will be taken to a profile page with their current Facebook status and other information. For example, here is my profile page: Tim_XtremelySocial
Your Facebook Friends – See all of your Facebook friends and their current status message, regardless of whether they use this site or not.
Your Facebook Friend Activity Stream – See all your friend’s activities (news) just like your home page on Facebook itself.
Our Wall – Our Wall is just like the wall on Facebook. Feel free to use it like a guestbook or to provide feedback about our website. You can optionally post your comments back to your Facebook news stream to share them with your friends.
Invite Friends – Invite your Facebook friends to check out our website.
More Features Coming Soon – Our vision is to continue to provide even more connectivity and integration with Facebook and eventually connectivity with Twitter, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

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Welcome to XtremelySocial!

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:42:00 +0000

One of the great features with this site is that you can log in with your Facebook user ID and password. No need to register with yet another website! You can also post your comments on this site to your Facebook news stream, if you would like. You can see a list of your Facebook friends and their current status. You can easily invite your friends to check out our website as well. New! Now see your whole Facebook friend activity (news) stream!

We plan to add even more Facebook functionality and also add similar features for Twitter, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

XtremelySocial.com is owned by Tim Nicholson and builds socially-connected applications and websites to keep you connected to the people that matter most in your life. This site encompasses all of our internet projects, such as our various Facebook applications and websites.

Our Facebook Applications

My Greetings (formerly WallPoke) allows you to do things to your friends, such as send them a drink, tell them you love them, or cheer on your favorite sports team with various icons. You can also post your mood or your favorite team to your own profile. Currently there are over 400 different greetings icons/actions that you can send to your friends, including smilies, love, holiday greetings, birthday, drinks, cute critters, all major NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, and NCAA team logos, and many more!

My Info (formerly My Profile Box) lets you place any HTML on your Wall or Boxes tab. It even lets you place it on its own dedicated tab. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout. Cut and paste code snippets from various websites to spruce up your Facebook profile!

My Status shows you all your past Facebook and Twitter status updates and easily lets you update your status on both Facebook and Twitter. It also shows your Twitter friend updates, the public timeline, etc. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout for placing a box with your recent status updates on your Wall.

Our Websites

PalmZone.net is a site dedicated to publishing useful news and information about Palm-Powered handhelds from all device manufacturers. It is a community-based site where users and casual readers alike are encouraged to participate in discussions and surveys, comment and rate articles, and submit news, software, Palm links, etc.

PdaMobileWeb.com is a comprehensive site index of PDA-friendly websites, covering email, entertainment, finance, news, PDA’s, portals, reference, shopping, sports, tech, travel, and more. It is easy to use and optimized for mobile devices with limited screen space and limited bandwidth connections. The site is designed specifically for Palm PDA’s, Pocket PC’s, and cell phones.

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