As I develop and learn more about promoting my own Facebook Fan Page, I want to share what I find and learn about with all of you.  One thing I have been most often is that many fan pages are taking advantage of having a larger profile picture, to keep your brand front and center.  So, today – I’ll be walking you through the process I took when it came to giving mine the same sort of facelift on Facebook.

Getting Started With the New Logo

First, let us take a look at my logo thus far:

Pretty simple and to the point.  It is a quick logo I came up with, and I also let you know what my projects are – just in case somebody stumbled across this page, before they checked out any of my projects.  I think I can do better.  One thing to remember when creating these images is that they can be up to 200×600 pixels in size.

Picking the Right Colors for the Job

For the color choices, I decided to go with shades of blue – mainly because in psychological terms, blue is most often associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. These are all traits I want you to associate with me.  (Well, maybe not so much seriousness – but you get my point)

Putting the Logo in Place

Next, I want to place my logo across the top again, and this time I am using white for the logo so it is easier to read.

Giving Details About My Projects

Now, in my older version of my logo above, you can see I just named off my projects.  While this is ok, I think it would be better to visually show them the websites.  This way, a visitor of the Facebook Fan Page will know, “Hey, this guy writes and maintains some awesome looking websites!” or something to that effect.  Also, they will see the layout is similar between the layouts – so if they like Firefox Facts, then they might be interested in checking out the Web Hosting Show, because it is presented in much the same way.

Finishing Touches on the Facebook Fan Page

We have a new background for the image, we have put the logo in place and we have given more details on what exactly my projects are.  So, now we are ready for the finishing touches.  I added a 1 pixel border around the image, uploaded it to Facebook and here is the final result:

I am not claiming that it is the perfect Facebook Fan Page profile image, but it is an evolution over my last.

• Come join the fun on Mitch’s Projects Facebook Fan Page!

Once I come up with a good enough reason to do another redesign, I might even detail the steps here again.  You should always look for ways to better any project you work on, and this guide gives you a step by step reasoning behind how and why I changed up my own Facebook Fan Page profile image.

The last time I used the web site commenting service Disqus, I was really less than impressed.  Back in July 2009, I tried it and for lack of a better term, it was sloppy.  While the core of the system worked, it seems as if nobody there paid attention to detail.  However, everybody deserves a second shot.

Fast forward to about a week ago, when I decided to re-install Disqus again on Mitchelaneous.com, FirefoxFacts.com and WebHostingShow.com.  As a reminder, here are the flaws the system had before:

Now I’ll cut to the chase, and tell you why.  It seems that no matter how I tweaked around with WordPress, I could never get DISQUS to pick up on all my trackbacks and comments.  One or two a day would get stuck going to the internal WordPress comment engine (which is practically blocked from you after you install DISQUS).

Now, while this is still true, Disqus does a better job now at picking up all the comments, so none get missed.  If you have trouble with Disqus missing comments or trackbacks, try these steps out:

1. Login to your WordPress administrator section, and go to Settings > Discussions.
2. Be sure to leave these unchecked:
   + Users must be registered and logged in to comment
   + Automatically close comments on articles older than X days
   + Enable threaded (nested) comments X levels deep
   + Break comments into pages with X top level comments per page…
   + Anyone posts a comment
   + A comment is held for moderation
   + An admin must always approve the comment
   + Comment author must have a previously approved comment
3. Under “Comment Moderation” be sure to bump up the link number to something ridiculously high, like 200.  This way WordPress won’t try to moderate the incoming comments and will leave that job to Disqus.

Also, be sure to save your settings after making those changes. Ever since I made those changes, I have had no problems with WordPress and Disqus, and hopefully neither will you.

The real benefit in using Discus is it gives your commenters a way to login to comment via multiple different services. For example, you can now login using these services to comment right here on Mitchelaneous.com:

• Disqus
• Facebook
• Twitter
• OpenID
• Yahoo

I also really like the fact that in the usual “trackback” section, you can show people’s recent tweets about your pages too.  You can skim Digg, Twitter, and a number of other social web sites. I can also stay in touch with all of you better too because Disqus gives me one place to check out all the most recent comments from across all my blogs.

So Disqus, I take back the bad things I said about you.  Just keep up the great work, and I’ll be a happy fan boy.

Some of the cool features that IntenseDebate brings includes:

• Comment Threading – this allows you to add a comment to the general discussion, or just reply to one comment that needs a reply.
• Reply by E-mail – the reply by e-mail feature makes it super-easy to stay in the conversation.  You can respond to and moderate your comments with the ease of just replying to an e-mail.
• Importing and Exporting – the best feature of all, the import and export feature is nice.  It gives you a “way out” just in case IntenseDebate doesn’t tickle your fancy.

You can read about the other features, such as reputation points and commenter profiles here.   There is also a ‘bit of a social network thrown into the mix too – which is a nice touch.  You get your own profile page, where people can find where you have commented and who you are following. Here is my profile as an example:  http://www.intensedebate.com/people/cheasym

Sign up is easy (especially if you have an Open ID) and they walk you through the steps of adding it you your blogging engine of choice.

Writing is one of those skills that everybody can do, but not many can master. If you broke it up into a chart you would have those who can’t being a very small percentage of the pie, those who have mastered it being another slightly larger pie piece and then those who are “somewhere in the middle” taking the rest of the cake pie. 

Writing Tips to Help You Lead the Reader

If you master one skill though I can promise you that your own personal writing will improve. You must learn to lead, now what does that mean?

• Break things into chunks, with each chunk or paragraph being a new topic or idea. I always cringe when I see somebody asking my opinion on something that have written and it is a three page article that is all in one single paragraph.

• Don’t be afraid to add sub-headlines to your work. It works great to help those who just scan their articles first for information to find exactly what they are looking for.

• One thing I remember from my middle school and high school journalism classes was to write with message or idea, then follow it up with a quote. Then you give more of the story – followed by a quote. This is another way to fill up an uninteresting drabfest and make it more captivating. No mater what you think, we all want to hear what others have to say about something and that gives the reader instant gratification.

• Don’t let yourself be intimidated by other’s work. Let us say you read a great article by a great writer and your first thought is, “I could never do that”. Take this as a learning experience instead, read it again and keep this message in the back of your head, “How could I do something like this?”

So next time you start writing your opinion, want to share a suggestion or have the urge to rant about your passion don’t be afraid to spruce up your work with a few of these suggestions.

+ See Yahoo! Search Builder in Action!
+ Read About Yahoo! Search Builder on Tech Crunch!

I am looking forward to playing with this. Yahoo! has actually done a better job than Google has at re-indexing all my Web pages since I moved from Blogware to my own server space. It has been a while since I used Yahoo! as a default search engine, but it is looking pretty sweet with the search builder tossed in there.