Dayn W Creative

• Social Media Strategies for Non-Profits – My slides from the presentation at First Independent Bank on June 17, 2010
• Conversational Case Study: Myth or Fact – Can Small Nonprofits Win with …
• Twitter Social Good Campaigns: Moving Up The Ladder of Engagement …
• Closing the Loop Between Social Media and Offline Action – Beth’s Blog …
• 5 Ways Non-Profits Can Increase Engagement With YouTube
• How Does Twitter’s New Social Good Initiative Stack Up?
• 26 Charities and Non-Profits on Twitter
• The Future of the Non-Profit Internet
• Non-Profit Uses Foursquare to Raise Environmental Awareness
• This Week in Social Media – Download free podcast episodes by PjA …
• Future of the Internet IV | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American …
• YouTube – NGO tips – Tips on how to effectively use video for non profits.
• Hope140 · Twitter – Twitter’s donate and retweet application for social good.
• YouTube – Non-Profit program – Special YouTube program for Non-Profit organizations.

• Personal Tech: Apple iPad FAQ’s – @pogue answers all of the important questions I had about iPad. Video out, how’s the typing experience (really), USB, they 12hr battery life claim is not a myth.
• Facebook’s New Solution For Unofficial Pages: Community Pages – Facebook makes a distinction between brand pages and pages meant to build community around a topic. Think it will take off?
• BRITE: Influence on Twitter can’t be purchased with Kim Kardashian | Econsultancy – Can you buy influence on Twitter? Maybe this should say “meaningful influence”?
• iPhone and iPad Stock Files – collis – GraphicRiver – iPad UI graphic elements kits from Envato for your application design and wireframing needs.
• Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0 – Custom post types is going to be a game changer for my dev team. We currently use a few plugins to massage WordPress into a CMS, namely Flutter and Secondary HTML Content. Custom post types might eliminate the need for those plugins. RT @danielbachhuber.
• Mirror files across systems with rsync – Backup utilities – Lifehacker – I know this is the right way to backup. Real geeks use rsync. I haven’t had the chance to poke this bear yet, but Gina’s article is where I’ll start.

These are my links for March 4th through March 8th:

• Digital Lift Off – Digital media spending officially passes print.
• The New News – Where are we really getting our news? Stats from Pew Internet -
• Advertising on Facebook Strikes Some as Off-Key – NYTimes.com – Ad quality on Facebook is getting noticably spammy. I often “delete” ads for “irrelevance” so that Facebook will take the hint, but I’m realizing that what I really want is a way to mark an ad as “low quality” or “spam”. Facebook might investigate these ads differently than the ones I mark irrelevant. I’d be flagging them as detrimental to the whole FB ad platform, not just irrelevant to my interests.
• How to Add / Embed YouTube Videos & Flash in Facebook Static FBML pages – A very clear tutorial on how to show a YouTube video on a Facebook Fan Page. Make sure you install the Static FBML app, then use the FBML markup here.
• 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page – Thanks to Allison Driscoll’s for this Mashable article recommending possibly the 8 best apps for Facebook Fan Pages. The second half of this article goes into Facebook Fan pages that are utilizing these Facebook Apps well. The article is 9 months old, but she’s provided a nice little Facebook Fan Page best practices guide here.

Turn on 2 fingers and click for right click on a mac laptop.

If you haven’t noticed that your Apple laptop doesnt have a right click trackpad button, I envy you.  For those that have, you may have figured out that you can hold ctrl and click to bring up the right click menu.

Here’s a new, easier way from Lifehacker’s Top Ten Right Click Tools that I’ll be adopting immediately.  In System Preferences, (click the Apple logo in the upper left) choose Keyboard & Mouse.  Check the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” checkbox.

Now, to fire trigger the right click, put two fingers on the trackpad, and click!

I use Adium as my IM chat client because it allows me to chat across networks (AIM MobileMe, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, and so many more) from one app.

Somehow, my MSN Messenger contact info must have gotten out, because I began to get hit every 5 to 10 minutes on MSN with a SPAM instant message.  It varied slightly, but was usually something like “I can’t get (something) to work. Check out my pictures at (url)”, or “I saw you on (blah), login to (url) so we can chat.”

Thankfully, blocking this unwanted IM SPAM is easy in Adium.  From the menu bar, choose Adium>Privacy Settings…  Choose the offending Account, in my case, my MSN account.  Then, for Privacy Level, choose Allow only contacts on my contact list.  Close the window.  Presto, no more instant message SPAM from that account.

Personally, I find it’s really not too complicated of a process.  When writing an email or blog post, I try to think of a subject line or heading that would instantly make me click a story, or open an email.  I can look through emails and stories that I have clicked, and re-engineer a headline based on the same principals.  For me, those principals are usually relevance to projects I’m working on, and time investment to process the article or email.  Off the top of my head, I’d be hooked by “Top 5 WordPress plugins for designers” or “How to build an events engine in PHP”, or “Quick, professional masking techniques for After Effects”,  etc.

For more info on the science of subject lines and headlines, check out these articles:

15 Tips for Improved Subject Lines

The Subject Line Dead Zone

Email Marketing Subject Line Comparison (ironically a non-compelling headine IMHO)

I’m kind of a podcast fiend.  So, as a web designer, it should be no surprise that I listen to the Boagworld podcast.  Recently, Paul and Marcus highlighted 5 key tips to designing accessible websites.  Here they are in my words.

1. Utilize alt tags on images.
   The only way a screen reader (a device used to aid sight impaired internet users) will “see” your image is to describe exactly what the image is in words.  **Savvy designers will realize added benefit here, as search engines will pick up keywords in the alt tags.  Just make sure your alt tag copy is descriptive of the image, not loaded with keyword phrases that won’t aid the sight impaired.
2. Utilize title tags on links.
   Imagine a web page being read aloud to you.  Now imagine the person reading the page to you encounters a link.  Instead of telling you where clicking that link will take you, they begin to read out the destination URL.  Yikes.  With a proper title tag, you can tell your sight impaired users exactly what clicking the link does.  ie “click here to login”, or “click to visit my portfolio.”
3. Make sure you have fallback content for rich media.
   Most of us including rich media content will use Flash to do so.  If so, provide content that will be seen if the video or Flash cannot be loaded.  Usually, this can be taken care of with the SWFObject implementation method.  Don’t leave a hole where the media would be, fill it with a backup image or copy.  **Here’s another plus for you cheeky designers.  (more…)