It’s Facebook!  It’s Stumbleupon!  It’s Flickr!  It’s WHAT IS HOT!

Two months ago I had not even heard about Pinterest.  Today I can’t turn-around without reading more about it and according to Alexa, (a decent barometer of website traffic) Pinterest is going through the roof!

The Pinterest terms don’t allow outright spamming and I doubt the spammers would be successful anyway because nobody would follow them – but if done properly Pinterest can be a good way to increase your brand recognition especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

Don’t miss out on the next big thing, jump in before it’s too late!

You all may remember the eBook I wrote in 2007 about how I first started GrownUpGeek.com and the things I did that made it a success. For those that don’t remember: I sold approximately 1,000 copies of the .PDF version at $10 each. About two years later I made an HTML version available here in the blog for free.

Well now my incredibly popular (back then at least) eBook is now available for FREE in the iTunes iBook store!  If you have an iPod, iPad, or iPhone running iOS5 or newer, you can download and enjoy it all over again!  CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW or DOWNLOAD

With Apple’s release of the free iBooks Author app, easily creating interactive eBooks/iBooks and publishing them to the iTunes store is a great way to reach millions of potential readers.  My eBook has only been in iTunes for 4 days and it’s already been downloaded nearly 100 times – I might just have to squeeze-out another ebook!

Our new video introduction clip for all those video reviews we post.

I was having trouble getting Facebook “Likes” and Facebook “Shares” to properly pickup my page summaries any time someone would “Like” or “Share” a page.  Instead of picking up the first few sentences of text from the page, Facebook was picking up my Adsense code – showing (Adsense code) jibberish on people’s Facebook Wall any time they shared one of my pages.  Facebook was also picking up the wrong images to display with the “Share”.

After 3 minutes of research and by using the Facebook Debugger Tool (VERY helpful!) I found that the Facebook crawler was confused by my lack of Open Graph (OG:) Meta tags.  I was using the Facebook Social Drupal Module but it only provides the bare minimum Open Graph meta tags for Shares and Facebook “Likes”.

For getting these additional Facebook meta tags, I found the Drupal Open Graph Meta Tags Module.

This module makes it easy to add Open Graph meta tags (http://opengraphprotocol.org/) to a node to enable it to be come a “rich” social object. For instance, Facebook uses this information to work out how to preview shared content in a user’s Facebook profile (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share).

This module makes it easy to select the image thumbnail used to represent the node (used by Facebook when constructing a preview). The editor is shown a list of thumbnails of all images associated with the node (both as fields as well as images embedded within the node’s body content).

If need be, meta tags can be restricted to specific content types and access to administering and editing meta tags can be restricted by role using Drupal’s built-in permissions system.

After getting your Open Graph meta tags configured, you may notice that when Sharing or Like-ing pages, Facebook is still not seeing your tags – this is because the Facebook crawler has the old page cached.  You can force the Facebook crawler to re-crawl your page and update it’s cache by using the Facebook Debugger Tool.  Just enter the URL and hit the DEBUG button, and the Facebook crawler / bot will recrawl your page and update the Facebook cache.