 Good morning everyone. This is Michael Sowers sitting in for Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission and this is the December 26, 2013, the last Encompass Live episode of 2013. I am usually the co-host for the last episode of a month as it is the Tech Talk episode with me, the Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Krista is usually our show host, but she is on a much-deserved holiday vacation this week. So as usual as the last episode of the month, this is Tech Talk and we're going to be talking to a colleague of mine from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, J.D. Thomas in just a few moments about his social sharing service that he has created. I just want to remind everybody that we are recording, so this will be posted probably within a couple of days and actually due to holidays maybe not till next week. If you have questions as we're going along, feel free to type them into the questions area of your GoToWebinar interface. We also have the ability to turn on people's microphones, so if you'd rather ask a question via audio, just go ahead and say unmute me in the questions area and I can do that. We'll happily take questions throughout the episode and then I'll be passing them along as we have time or appropriate and then we'll always have time for Q&A at the end. So let's go ahead and dive right in here and I have to run the show behind the scenes here too, not just host. So J.D., are you on the line? Yes, I am. All right. Well, welcome J.D., why don't we go ahead and get started and tell us a little about yourself and your background and what you do? Well, I do a lot of things. My day job is for a publisher information today that hosts library conferences like Internet Library International, Internet Librarian, computers and libraries and between the shows I manage a lot of the servers, handle a lot of the social media stuff, a lot of the SEO stuff, that kind of thing. Great. So you've got this service that you've put together and I'm going to let you pronounce it accordingly because to be honest, every time I look at it I feel like I'm speaking about the Lovecraft mythos and so why don't you tell us what you got for us today here? Okay, we call it SHOGUS. SHOGUS, okay. And the SHOG, well first of all, we wanted a short URL. So the SHOG is for sharing open graph. If you're not familiar with open graph, it's a protocol for metadata that's used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr. Twitter uses its own. It used to use open graph but it's a way of describing or marking up a web object in a way that tells Facebook and LinkedIn how to display the information to the other users. So that's where the name came from but we just call it SHOGUS. And what it does is it allows you to take a link to any resource, any HTTP URL and kind of dress it up, give it a makeover, make sure that it looks pretty when it's shared. This is especially important for I find libraries and publishers like information today because so much of the stuff we publish is coming out of a database or it's one part of a larger set of data. And when you share things directly to it, sometimes you get a model description. You're talking about the third thing on a page and the description for the first thing, that sort of stuff. Cool. Okay, so how does it work? Okay. It works basically by taking a URL and allowing you to add your own metadata, picture, and description without having any programming skills. Let me actually just give you a good before and after kind of thing. This link here is the link to the Job Seekers page on the Philly Free Library website. That page looks like this. It's not fancy but it gets the job done. But when somebody wants to share that on Facebook to tell their friends, hey, there's job services at the Philly Free Library, this is what they get. Okay. Now what I did is I created a Shogus link for that page that looks like this when it's shared. You can see it's got a picture. It's got a proper description, proper title. It makes the link much more engaging and much more likely to be shared by others. It helps you get information out further. And I'm going to show you what that looks like on here. So this is the link creation page. This is what you use to create every link and you can edit it after the, you know, if you don't like how it came out, you can edit it or if something changes, you can edit it and the link will still stay live. So up here at the top in the address, this is the actual URL on the library site. This is a picture. I used the Wikipedia Commons to find a public domain picture of the Philadelphia Free Library's main branch that I liked. And I used it. You can upload the images. You can also store up to five images of your own that you want to use regularly. Like I say, you might want your library logo. You might want, you know, a picture of an ebook. You can store those in the system, but we'll get to that later. So I picked that. I gave it a different title instead of saying FLP, how to find a job, which doesn't really tell you where you're talking about a person who doesn't know what FLP is. I went with the workplace, which is the name of their job service. And as you can see, added a description. I wanted to make sure that even though I personally as a private citizen in Philadelphia who doesn't work for the library was sharing it, I wanted to make sure that when it was shared, the library information was what people saw. So I told it that I'm talking about the Free Library of Philadelphia. I'm talking about their Twitter account. I want people to follow them based on my sharing this link and gives you a place to put information on where the link goes to. Just so people on Twitter specifically are not confused. And then when you create links to be able to find them easier, you can create tags for them, one or many. You can create as many tags as you want to help you find it later once you've built up a large link library. And then I specified the link of Shogus FLP Job Help and saved it. So at this point I was able to share it. You can see I shared this, I made this last night around nine o'clock and so far seven people have shared it since then. And let me just show you what that looks like on Twitter. It looks like this. And as you saw earlier on Facebook, it looks like that. Understand? Yeah, no. Okay, those look good. Well, I'm thinking as you're introducing this to me. So that's great. So, I mean, it looks better. Okay, what are the benefits of taking the extra time to do this? I guess because here's my scenario. I mean, I write things to my and I realize I'm not everybody's scenario. So we'll just go with me for now. Yeah, I post things on my WordPress Facebook blog and then I use the publicize feature to automatically send it to Twitter and to Facebook and to what not. This would take me some extra time. Why would I want to do this? This is not for everything. I do a lot of work on a WordPress driven site called Accessible Archives. And I use WordPress plugins to handle most of this stuff for me. The main purpose for this is things that are going to be, if things look right when you share them, don't do it. Well, they don't always. I will say that. Right. Actually, I follow your postings. Also, I know that I frequently end up with that weird brown picture. Yes. If you don't have another image in your WordPress post, it tends to pick that up from your theme. Well, usually I do. That's the funny part. But that's a separate problem. So if you wanted to override that for a certain situation, another time on WordPress, again WordPress specifically, that I do this is if I'm going to change the information over time, like say I'm saying, telling you about something that's going to happen in a month, I can do that. And I can take the same link without creating a new blog post. I can update. Let me go back to the screen here. I can clone a link and say, oh, it's two weeks from now, or it's one week from now. Do kind of a countdown sort of thing without having to create new blog posts that I want to promote. It also goes to your original resource. But the main reason I started doing this is because we had to share PDFs, for example. We want to promote the download of the final program for a conference. When you share a PDF, it looks horrible. Let me jump you over here. This is a beautiful, beautiful PDF that NASA made available. It's essentially an e-book of artistically gorgeous satellite footage. But if you wanted to share that with your friends on Facebook, this is what they get. So I took that same information and made this. They both go to the same place. They both go to this PDF. But one looks much better when shared. Same thing really goes for calendar events. Let me run you through a couple of other ones that I did real quick besides the job one. Like this is the calendar events for my local branch of the Philly Free Library. It's not real informative. But this is what would happen if I wanted to share this on Facebook. You can make it look like this. This is an actual event that's coming to my library in March. It's a craft thing where they're teaching about the history of mosaics and actually make them. Doesn't look good. That is the same event. They both take you to the same place. Neither one involved having to contact the web developer for the library and say, hey, we need to change how we do stuff. This can be done by the person organizing the event. They can provide this information and set this up in under three minutes. How long do we take you to make one? Same thing here. This is an example of what I was talking about where it can get muddled. The Philly Free Library has a great page full of things like Nook screensavers, Facebook cover images, things that are shared that are free that the library just does to kind of reach out and tell people about stuff. But if you share the link to the Facebook cover images and look at the description here, you see the description it gives you is all about the Nook screensavers. So by creating a showcase link on top of that, we can link to each part of that page and have the right information. So maybe the scenario that I'm in where I'm very blog centric and I want to reshare that content that I post out to social services like Facebook and Twitter is maybe not the appropriate use for this. If I'm a library that we have a website and we have Facebook but not necessarily any sort of blogging where we want to share a particular thing or we found a really cool link to something that's not even from the library that we want to share in the library's Facebook page or Twitter account, this would be maybe a tool to use to dress them up and make them look better and more shareable. Exactly. I mean I find a lot of libraries share things like PDFs directly. Like if you were to go into the Philly job section, there's a ton of PDFs there on how to make a good resume, good cover letter, that sort of thing that can't be shared directly. Same thing goes with things that are very deep within calendars. The nature of that technology that allows you to put your calendar on the web doesn't necessarily lend itself to social sharing. Dear Myrtle does have a question and we've gotten a couple of people already who have said they're getting it. They see the use for this. But Dear Myrtle, I'm going to hold the one question you have maybe more towards the end in this case for that one. So let's say you sold us here. How do I actually use it? What's involved? That sort of thing. Well it's still in beta right now but it's an open beta so anybody can get an account. Let me go here. If you go to Shogus, SHOGUS, come on. Welcome to live demos. There we go. And just go to sign up here. Name, email address, password. It just automatically filled my stuff in, of course. You'll get an email that'll come to you and just click on the confirmation link to verify that you're using a real email address and it will show up on my list of users and let me know when that happens and I will activate the demo. I mean I will activate the beta. Just so you know, anything you do during this beta is going to be perpetual. It's not, you know, if you decide you don't want to use the service once it goes live and costs money, won't ever cost much. I'm planning on keeping this dirt cheap because I want people to use it. But anything you create will stay live. Go ahead. I'll interject there. That was Deer Myrtle's question. How much? Hey Pat. We're going to be talking probably, we're guessing like 20 a year for a basic use. And that'll be for up to like 500 links. If you go above that we may have to add, you know, start selling additional links. A couple other things I didn't go through here. You can do your own domain names. So this is my profile. I fill in all my Facebook information. Everybody who sets up an account will need to do this. You know, the Facebook publisher would be your page. You know, the author would be you yourself. Your Twitter information. These are all defaults. They can all, all this information can be overridden on a link by link basis as you saw. When you see this section of the profile, just so you know, this is not to gather any information that's used to the links. All this is used for is to allow you to log in with a single click using one of your social media accounts instead of typing a username and password. But here's the cool part. If you have your own domain name, like a, what's your domain name? Like you got travel and librarian? Travel and librarian.info, yep. Yes. You could create a C name called links.travel and librarian.info. Save it here and all of your URLs could be in that domain. Oh, okay. Would I have to do anything on my end? You would have to create, yeah, there's actually FAQs that tell you how and all of those. You would set up a C name pointing to domains.showbis.showb.us. If you can't do a C name, you can use the IP address. I'd much rather you use a C name. That just sends all traffic for that, you know, links.travel and librarian.info to us and then our service takes over processing the individual links. Okay. So for those not in setting up a domain name, I usually have somebody do that. So let's see if I understand it correctly. That's something I would need to do with whoever my domain host is. Yeah, your registrar. My registrar. Okay. No, I'm not going to do it. Yeah. No, I know who that, in my case it's Dottster. Okay. Yeah, you would go into Dottster. You would see where it lets you create new records and you probably already have a www.travel and librarian. So you just create a new one. If it gives you a choice of C name or a record, you'd want a C name and then it's going to ask you what the C name should be and that's where you would put in whatever you want to be before your domain name. So it could be links, it could be shares, it could be whatever you want.travel and librarian. And then for the destinations where you would put domains.show.us. Okay. I didn't show you that when I was doing a new link. There's, if I create a link by default, mine links to techfind.org, which is my own personal domain that I've had since, you know, the early 90s. But these three are available for free that everybody gets them. So to get to us, show us and slash, slash, slash.com. Just because it's fun to say. I'm telling people to go to http colon slash slash slash slash dot com. I registered that as a joke in like the year 2000 and I just held on to it. So I wasn't using it, so I threw it on here. So if you have your own domain name, you get to use that, but you can also use the other ones as well. If you want to just do something that you don't necessarily want linked to your personal, you know. Okay. So if I set this up, they would see links, not travel, library and info, but it would, it would redirect through you guys anyways. Right. It's right. Okay. You know how Bitly, everybody's seen Bitly links. Sure. All this, all we're doing here is we're doing a lot of the same stuff Bitly does, but we're adding a lot of information along the way. And they should kind of explain the mechanism in case there's anybody out here is actually a web developer or wants to know the quick geeky side of this. What we do here is when traffic hits the server, we look at whether it's a browser, like a human browser or if it's a robot. When Twitter scans a link before when you share it, it identifies itself as the tweet bot. So if it's tweet bot, we give it all the metadata it needs to craft a really lovely link like this, you know, or like that. If it's a person, we send them right on to, you know, this, using a redirect, a 302, like this is, I did this URL for this particular event. So I could share it over and over, you know, leading up to today. So if a human, and I'm going to do it as a human here, gets it, their browser gets a 302, which is the same thing Bitly sends, same thing all, you know, URL shortener send. And it tells the person's browser to go here, you know, to the real URL that we all went to today. Understand? Okay. And then if the person coming in is not a human, if it's Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, instead feeds it at an interstitial page, it's only visible to robots that contains all the markup that they need. And I will show you what that looks like because that's also useful. Where is my object? So getting back to the raw stuff, this is what Facebook sees when this jobseeker URL is shared. There's no description for the page. So it has to guess. It doesn't know what image to use. It just sees that there's three on the page and, you know, hopes for the best. The title is shown here. Now, once we put it through Shogus, this is what they see. They see a proper title. They see a URL. They see the description, the site name, all that stuff. And that's only visible to the Facebook scraper. Any human being clicking on this is going to get the job page directly here. And if you are a developer, this is what we're adding to this process. This is the good stuff. This markup data right here is what we are allowing you to put in without having to actually go in and touch an HTML page. That's handy. Yeah. The stuff on Twitter, just so you can know, this does not happen magically. For your domain, you have to go into Twitter's card validation system and tell it you're going to be using Twitter cards. And that tells Twitter that they should go out and scrape your domain when necessary to find that information. These are the two we support. Summaries, if it's got a small picture that doesn't really matter, or summary with large images. And you just use the validation tool by putting in your first short URL you create on Shogus. Let's go. And then if you were to do it, Michael, for example, it would allow you to support Twitter cards across the entire travel and librarian.info domain. Okay. I just want to make sure that that was covered so nobody got confused if they set up one and didn't work immediately. And all of this is documented very well, right? Yeah, there's all these. We're working. Anything that's not email me or let me know, and I will add another section to it. My problem is, as we were talking about earlier, I'm not sure what people know and don't know. So if it turns out it's something that you need to know, let me know. I can add another section to the FAQ. If you do set up an account on here, be sure to read this page. If you're to help and then configure your profile, I break down what everything in that profile is and does and how it affects the items that are shared. And I think the screen you're showing right now answers dear morals. Next question, which is, do you cover explaining tweet cards? And I think that's what we're looking at here. Actually, that's what I was just doing. Yeah, this is the tweet card thing. And how to get a tweet card validated is all handled here. It's, if you ever can see that URL, if you can share that into chat, so people can see it or I can. Yeah, we'll pull those links and put them in the show notes. But yeah, when you go to validate a card, like I said, there's a lot of cards available and there's more all the time and we may end up adding more. But for right now, the two that we support are the summary and the summary large image, which are basically the closest analog to a Facebook share. We're trying to keep the same, trying to find ways to use the same metadata in multiple ways. Sure. Actually, I'll also show you one. This is the, let me find it. This is the one I was doing earlier. Okay, so the ALI Midwitter site, it's not marked out very well at all. If you share the homepage for ALI Midwitter, this is what you get. And then I made this one to go with it. And then just wanted to show you, this is what it looks like when shared on LinkedIn. I have trouble finding links on LinkedIn after I've shared them sometimes. So I took a screenshot. Gotcha. So just wanted to see that it's not just Facebook and Twitter, it's also LinkedIn. If you have a Tumblr and share one of those URLs, you'll see it on there that it goes out and grabs the image, it grabs the description for use in the, I'm sorry, I'm trying to say Tumblr, in the Tumblr post. Okay. Questions? So what, okay, just so let's go, let's care, because you just threw in Tumblr there, which is good. What services will this post do right now? Right now, you can post the link to anything. The ones that it's going to give you the biggest benefit for are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. Okay. Those are the ones that actually make use of the metadata that you're adding in by creating these links. Go back to mine. Okay. So how about this? Create for me a brand new link to something. How about your homepage, your blog? Okay. And just for the record, that was his suggestion, not mine. Yes, it was. It was definitely mine. And on a blog, it's especially useful because, you know, the homepage changes all the time. Yes. Yes. And we're also getting a question about Google Plus, if you're going, if you do or... Google Plus, it, this does provide, Google Plus uses the OG data for the titling and for the picture, but they don't use the description data. I don't know if anybody's noticed that Google Plus, for some reason, stopped grabbing texts when you share a link. They expect you to put the, any texts that you want to go with a link, they want you to put in the actual post. So it does work that way. You can do that. Okay. It does work on Google Plus. I just don't promote that just because they used to support full open graph and they stopped. Let me do your page real quick here. Okay. So that's, this is where we want the people to go. And here's a problem. Like, you don't really have a picture on here that's, you know, suitable for your whole page, but we are going to just grab a picture just so we can have one. I love WordPress. You can always figure out how to get to the big image. So, oh, by the way, on here, you can upload an image if it's sort of your hard drive, but if the image is available via URL, you can have the system grab it for you like that. All right. It saves that whole step of downloading and then re-uploading. Okay. What is your blog called, Michael? The Traveling Librarian. Like that? Yep. Do you don't want your name in there or anything? That's sure. I should never have done this because I never remember how to spell your last name. S-A-U-E-R-S. Thank you. Yeah. When I created the link to the adventure day, I did it over. I had to go look it up every time. And we're just going to grab some text here. Obviously, you could do this however you wanted, but add a description. And we're just going to call this the Traveling Librarian. And what's your M-Sour? M-Sours, yep. Is that right? Correct. Okay. And we actually want to use the real domain here, so I will grab that. And we're just going to do a summary curve. We're not going to do the large image because that's not a, you know, sure. And we'll just do, there's a color demo so I can find it later. And it'll actually validate to make sure that this slug is not used by somebody else and you'll get a green check mark. And we can create the link. And then there's that. And now share this on Twitter. We'll also share this on Facebook. These are strictly, these are from the add this service, if you're unfamiliar with it. Oh, okay. Because it makes it really easy. These are set up to automatically grab this URL and not this URL. He's my mouse. Yes, yes. Okay. Yeah, you always want to share the link that's in the gray box. The link up at the top is strictly for you as the creator. So this gives us, you can see here, we already have a little preview of what we're going to go. Obviously it's not the best picture about you. That's fine. Let's show you. So there we go. And so now if we go back to Twitter, I should have a new post here. And there we go. Twitter always takes a few minutes for the picture to show up because they download it, resize it and cache it. But it'll be there. If you come back later, it'll have the picture. Sometimes if you go to the individual, it'll show up, trust me on this. You can see that it does have the text though. I mean, it has all the, has exactly what we told it to use. And then back to Facebook. It's down here. Off to my page. And there's, because this is the narrow column, so you get the little side picture. When it shows up in someone's main news feed, it'll look like that. Okay. And you can make a nice short one of those for your home page, especially if you have a blog. This would be a situation where WordPress might benefit from this. If your home page does not have a static page, if you actually are using a blog the way you do. But that's it. I mean, once you have the stuff that you want to use to create it, like so if you created a nice little, you know, get some graphic designer to make a nice little logo for your mic, you could actually upload it to your, show this account in your profile. Right. And you wouldn't have to deal with the image thing at all. You can just go and grab it. Right. Okay. And like I said, you can serve up to five of them up there. And if you delete it from here, it still stays there for old links that use it. So it's not like you're stuck to those five forever and ever. Okay. And then if back to the page where you were sharing from, I saw a, you had the Twitter logo, the Facebook logo, the, and then there's a plus. Well, and then there's a plus plus. Oh, again, this is part of add this. I would not particularly use these. This is the way the add this system works. You could try it. It depends on the system. It depends on whether or not systems use open graph or not. Okay. So you're using yet somebody else's service to do those buttons. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is the, there's add this, share this, there's these tools that stay on top of all the APIs for sharing. And that's what this is. Yeah, this is not something that we chose, which of these to show here. I get me. I haven't done a Google plus one in a while. So it's because Google plus doesn't grab the description. I'm just copying that and sharing it. So this is what it looks like on Google plus. Oh, look, it wants to tag you with Nebraska. Yeah. So that's what it looks like shared on Google plus because Google does not grab descriptions like these do. Right. Yeah. You know, I hadn't noticed that, I hadn't noticed that, but it hadn't really clicked in my brain yet. It's been driving me insane. I spent probably two days digging through, you know, Google's blogs and trying to figure out if there's some something they were changing, but then I realized that it was happening to everybody, even to stuff that you share from Google. Right. You know, if you go to their SEO, you know, their webmaster blog and share something, it still does the same thing. It just cuts out the description entirely. Okay. Next question. Yeah. I'll just take this moment to remind some of you have been typing in questions. We've gotten a couple of comments. Dea Myrtle also said her blog always features a good graphic for networked blogs to redistribute, but that auto sharing feature for Facebook only features text from the first paragraph. And sometimes I prefer another quote. This service would work better in that case. Also, my Twitter posts would look a thousand percent better. Yeah. I think so. A lot of stuff to share through network blog. Network blog actually does something similar to what we do is adding itself as an interstitial page. That's why you get the bar across the top. I'm pointing at my screen so you guys can see this. That's why you get that bar across the top there. So there's actually, that can interfere with the way Facebook and other sites scrape the data from your page because they might be scraping it from network blog and not from your actual, you know, real live website. This way, this does the same thing, but it's you doing it and you controlling it. Okay. So eventually I will ask you maybe to explain a little under the hood a little bit, but what sort of statistics, if anything, can I get out of this? Is there any benefit to me from there? We do track human clicks. That's what these numbers are here. Okay. So for example, you know, a nonprofit that I work with in Philly called Career Wardrobe was part, they were one of their project for awesome contenders this year. So I promoted, you know, their average try to get people to go vote for them. And they got 149 clicks from human beings based on this, not scrapes by robots and that sort of thing. We can look at the link we've been using to promote this thing because you've shared it a few times as well as I as well as me and we've had 79 clicks on the link to today's event. Okay. And you know, keep in mind that these are actual people, you know, these are not the clicks strictly applied to people who clicked on them on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn. Because that's the only places I think we've shared these. I don't think I've shared this on Tumblr or Google Plus for that matter. Now that I think about it, I probably should have. But yeah, that's what's available to you there. I kind of mentioned it earlier, but this is a good example of what I was talking about about being able to get more life out of a single link. For most of the time that we've been promoting this event, since we first talked about this what in October was it? The URL that people were supposed to go to was actually the Encompass live site where they could register. But once that closed, I changed the destination to go directly to the GoToMeeting signup page. Oh, okay. And I just did that by going into it and changing the link here. So you can have, you know, if an event is over, like when this one's over and Krista puts the YouTube video up, I might go in here and change the link to point to that. So the link can let, you know, this URL, same URL that I've shared and that people might be clicking on still if they go and search for stuff. That same URL will now point to the finished product, you know, the video on YouTube instead of the signup page or even farther back to the announcement page. Right. And then that way you're not tracking statistics on four different links. Right. You're tracking the stats on that one link which passes through to somewhere else depending on the time and the life span of the event in this case. Right. Because this link, like Suggest, Encompass live, this URL here, because that URL is what's going out to the world where this URL redirects to in this case, you know, that link today is under our control entirely. Right. So we can make that go anywhere. So if it's, you know, if I want to link to a preliminary program for computers and libraries, okay, because the final program is not out yet, when the final program comes out, I just go in here and repoint things to the final so people are always getting the latest data without having to tell people, you know, anything different. This, anyone who has that link will automatically go to the latest information. And we just got a wow that URL changeability is a great idea. So that was the other big part of this that kind of drove this is the need to do that. The need that, the understanding that once you put something out in social media, you kind of have to surrender control over it. You know, it's not yours anymore. It's now, you know, part of the social ecosystem. But by being able to have this interstitial layer and control it, you can do things like, like I just said, like pointing to a different location after an event is over. I was going to show you that actually here was the, I'm going to take that link I shared of yours. We're just going to see what's happened with it. It's going to get a little geeky here, people. Ah, we need, we need more command line in the show. Let's take, okay, so we can see that 14 people have clicked on the link, Michael. Wow. I'm going to grab your slug here. And this is the actual, you know, this is the actual server. So I'm going to tell it that I want to see all the traffic to that slug. And we can look here and see, actually, first let's do the 200s. These are the people that have actually seen what we prevented. So you can see the Google scraper has seen it, Twitterbot has seen it, Flipboard has seen it, because this is actually, if somebody takes one of these links and scrapes it, it'll look right in a Flipboard presentation, but I don't do that personally. So I haven't, I don't list that as something it does, because I haven't really had a chance to look into if it's doing it the best way possible. But you can see a lot of people are picking up stuff from my Twitter, from my tweet for Flipboard. Oh, okay, got it, right, okay. Like this is a, this is a poll. So somebody grabbed this and because their user agent was Flipboard proxy, we fed them the page that I showed you with all that metadata in it. Now, if we go to here and look at 3.0, these are a lot fewer people, but these are the people who actually were redirected to your site. So these are some people on Google Plus clicked on that link. People on Facebook, that was the Facebook short URL. Somebody using Facebook mobile, in other words, got that. This is not as useful if you're not, if you don't really know what you're looking at. Well, sure, no, well, I get it though. I mean, that, that, that, I think that helps. So I guess here, here would be my question and I, and I'm assuming you can't do this yet. So what's, either I'm going to give you an idea or you're gonna like want to smack me. You can obviously access this because you're, you're accessing the server. So you've got the logs. Oh yeah. And now me as a user, I can get, you know, the number 14. What, were you thinking that there would be a way where I could get like this information? Like, no. This, this is because, and the main reason is because these are not discreet to you. This, this information, it's something you think about. Let me, let me, I actually have to talk to somebody about that. Well, I realize you'd have to write code to make it happen. I mean, that, that's, I'm just trying to think if it would be worth it because what you really, you know, what, what would be of most for use for you would be something like Google Analytics at the destination end because those are the people that fully load the page and, you know, and bang the analytics script. Whereas this is telling people that we gave them the real URL. It doesn't tell us what they did with it. Well, well, I'm kind of, well, see, and, and, and, you know, this is where I'm, I'm, those of you listening, I'm, I'm kind of working all this out in my head too. But like you said, like, well, here's somebody who clicked on the link from Facebook versus Twitter versus Google Plus. Oh, I see what you mean. Um, if, if that matters to you a lot, I would use, you know, this is what, um, I don't know if you hear Sheila Wilson. She's our director of marketing at ITI. She uses this system. She was one of the very first base on here. If you wanted to do that and if it really mattered that much to you, clone this and, oh, create different links that you share to the different services. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So then I've got, I've got the one I shared to Facebook, the one I shared to Google Plus, the one I shared to Twitter and then, and then on your links page here, because you can have as many as you want. You're not going to, um, you'll know, okay, this is the original one we shared. If you look at this one, you can see it's the Facebook one. Okay. Got it. If it, if it matters that much to you, I personally have, I mean, in all of my stuff, I don't see, I see a benefit of knowing how many people are coming via social media, but I don't see as much benefit at this level for how many are coming for Twitter, how many are coming from Facebook? Sure. Well, you know, I, I'm not, to be honest, I'm not sure I would actually do that, but I know people who would. Oh, I do too. That's, and we've got a comment that's saying, you know, it kind of lets us know where to put our energy. Well, that does, yeah, that if you're using this for, for very strict marketing purposes as opposed to the aesthetic purposes involved, I could see that and I would do, that's exactly what I would do is I would create separate links because I would probably want to tweak, you know, if I'm sharing something to LinkedIn, I'm sharing something to Facebook, I might not want to use the same verbiage for the description. Right. You know, Facebook is a little more, you know, Twitter is extremely casual because, you know, 140 characters. Right. Facebook is kind of like the mama bear. You can kind of be casual, but you can also be a little pro and then tech, and then LinkedIn is, you know, more Papa bearish. Right. Yeah, definitely pro there. Yeah. So in that case, you know, create the first link, clone it, you know, and then make it to your target audience. Sure. And another comment, thanks for the friendly gooey. This stuff is fascinating, but scary looking. So I think when, when you were grepping the server logs there. Yeah, the interface, that was the whole idea behind this because I was getting requests from people in a marketing department. Can we make it so that when we share this link to Facebook, it looks like this. And, you know, if you're, if you're a web designer, you absolutely can do this. I mean, it would take you, you know, depending on, you know, your speed of learning, you know, if you go and, you know, study up on open graph and study up on Twitter's custom metadata, you know, a couple of days you can, you can go through and, and add this stuff to your web pages. But you need to be, I won't see a coder, but at least a web developer or a, somebody who's comfortable working directly in HTML or in the case of a lot of people, PHP as well, because, you know, you're not going to want the same information on every page. You're going to want to have to, but this can be done by anyone. You know, the people that I have, that I started out doing this, some people who are my original testers who said, hey, what does this mean? Those are people that have zero technical skills beyond generally using the office and web. These are people that are perfectly comfortable in Excel, but not in, you know, compose. Sure. So, so let me ask you this when you were, when you, when you first started explaining this, this is kind of an open-ended question and it's also inherently difficult by the, the subject matter, but would, would, would you fault put this under the category of, of the semantic web in any way? Not really because, yeah, in the sense that, that metadata is driving a lot more than search. In that sense, yes, I would. Okay. Because, you know, in this case, the metadata is driving engagement, not, not, it's not helping people find these pages. It's helping people engage with these pages. Okay. It's, it's making them more interesting. It's making them visually appealing. In the case of Twitter, this is something they actually tell you about and they're, why they recommend doing it. Actually, let's see if your picture showed up yet. It's still not there. There it goes. See? Okay. It just takes a while for them to process the image, but here's the big thing. Okay. If you shared this without the Twitter card, this space right here is the entire clickable space. This is the only part that's live. Now look at my mouse. This takes us off to Michael's page directly. So, hey, let's follow Michael too late. Oh, I thought I was following you. Oops. I probably following you by a LibConf is what it is. Probably. So now I'm following you directly. Okay. But because we put in your Twitter handle in the link, it shows us your full name here. Okay. And it gives us this, which is clickable. The picture is clickable. The entire description is clickable, as well as, of course, the, the thing that looks like a link. So it gives you a much bigger target for your audience to, you know, hopefully, maybe not accidentally, but easily click on something. That's not called an accident. Accidentally works. You're making a bigger target of your content. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, all right. So let's, let's talk under the hood for a few minutes. And so, I mean, and I'll just start with what languages is written in. And anything else you may or may not want to show us under the hood? Not really. I mean, it's, it's not that complicated stuff. And there's really nothing much. Let me script wise here. This is just like I said, just, it's just a standard Apache log. Anybody who's got a website who has access to the log files has that I was just gripping in them to find out, you know, to find certain things. There's not a lot under the hood to tell you. I mean, there's a couple of guidelines that would help to know that, for example, LinkedIn still kind of favors a three by four image, like the traditional, you know, 800 by 600, 1024 by 768 style image, whereas Facebook has recently gone to, as we can all see, these big wide 580 by, what is it, 335 or something. So when you're creating a link, if you do want to really fine tune things, you might want to use a different image for a LinkedIn centric share versus a Facebook centric share. Other things under the hood, we handle the resizing of the images when you give us the link to download or if you upload the image. But for quality, the closer you can get to a thousand pixels wide, the better the picture will be because it means we'll have to do less resizing. If you upload a tiny little, you know, 150 by 300 pixel image, it's not going to look good when it's scaled to share on here. That's kind of under the hood stuff. But I keep thinking that you're describing like somebody's full-time job for, you know, just making all this stuff right. Well, I mean, from, you know, if you're really going for a full marketing, not the writing of it, but the using of this tool, you know, I just, I write my content and I let something else push it out. Whereas if you really are trying to get those hits and you're really trying to track that, this could be somebody's job for your institution. If you have enough web, if you have enough content going out that doesn't share again, remember a lot of stuff in WordPress shares fine natively and you can, if you're using WordPress standalone and you install the WordPress SEO tool, it does Twitter cards for you and it does let you have full control over the way the open graph stuff works. If you're using that, you don't need this at all. You do not need this in any way, shape, or form. And that can account for a lot of people who post, who do a lot of frequent content. Hold on one second and I want to cough in you guys. Although, well, and, you know, I'm just saying, you know, me, it is my personal blog and yes, I use it to kind of market myself, but I'm not really concerned with hit counts and, you know, and it's just, I put it on these services just to do it. Whereas, you know, somebody in a business or, you know, major library might be a lot more concerned about how it looks and where the link is. We do also have one other comment here is if you're looking for a tagline for your service, making a bigger target for your content. That didn't make a note of that. Because that really is what it does. I mean, it just makes, you know, it's your, the destination is the same. It's just a matter of, you know, putting, you know, okay, maybe it's good that we're doing this unboxing day because it's really, you know, all about the wrapping of the present. Good point. So here's the one other question I have that has come to mind and this is the cynic in me question that I ask or should ask of all services such as this. Okay, so you now have all of this data of what we're sharing. Do we have any reason to be concerned about what you're going to do with it? No. The only data I have is the same, you know, I can see where stuff came from, but it's not, you know, we don't, we're not pulling any data from your social media services. It's just what you're putting in there just on your links. I'm not sure what kind of other data there could be concerns about. Oh, I just wanted to make it defensive for a minute. Okay, I'm just trying to think if there's something I could collect. It's more just a larger question of this would be yet another third party service that we're using at the moment for free. You know, what's your terms of service? I guess it's interesting. Yeah, the there's nothing that we're collecting and there's nothing that we're we're using that you're not using that we're not giving back to you like those the counts of the clicks and stuff. We do have a terms of service up there to read and it basically just says, well, you should read it. Yeah, well, I should I'm sure but you know, yeah, it's not very long. There's not a lot. We're not I didn't worry too much about that aspect just because we're not collecting there. We're not in a position to collect a lot of data. You know, we are basically just like, you know, we're essentially bitly on steroids. It's, you know, okay. Well, and which which I suppose leads me to another question which which may not be answerable, but 2013 seems to have been the year that services shut down. And so if I spend the next six months running all my links through you and then you shut down, they all break, right? They all break. That's one thing we are working on. I wish I'd actually hope to have it up here before is I'm gonna have it set up in a way that you can download a .htaccess file. Okay. That would handle all the redirections for your links. Oh, okay. If we ever shut down, you could just append it to your, all you'd have to do is point your, you know, links.travellibrary.info back to your main site. Okay. And then just append this to the end of your .htaccess file. So if anybody hit those slugs, it would redirect them to wherever you told them to go in the first place. Okay. So kind of if long-term concern or if long-term working is your concern, best to use your own URL. Use your own URL and then you'll have some sort of like Google Takeout sort of. Yeah, that's it. I'm putting on the profile where you can just download it at will. It's generating that is not like resource intensive. So it's not like something I would have to schedule to happen overnight because it's going to slow down the system. Okay. No, it's one of those things that I just essentially just pull out a report for you and it's for you to save that text file. You're good to go. And once I do that, well, I'll obviously put a addition to the FAQ and how to use it. Right. Yes. And you have to be able to edit your .htaccess file. So we're talking another level there. But, you know, I'm not sure I could, but I know the guy who would be able to for me. So yeah, I'll give you a quick idea if I can hear. And we do have another comment from Jim Myrtle that this is in her realm of genealogy. People do look at old content a lot. So this would be absolutely in the long run. I thought I had a redirection here. Ooh, more code. Yeah, this is an .htaccess file for a blog. You remember when I talked about this stuff, Michael? Oh, yeah. This is blocking access. Anybody who uses a WordPress blog has probably seen or heard of the massive waves of people trying to hack into the admin interface. So what this does on mine is I don't allow anyone to even try it if they're coming from outside the US because I don't have anybody who should legitimately be logging in there from there. But I'm not going to bother. But yeah, an .htaccess file that tells people to redirect to the original place would kind of future-proof your stuff as long as you're using your own CNAME. Right. Because you have to be able to control where people go on that. But one of the reasons we're kind of been slow rolling this out is we are very concerned that this be extremely sustainable from our own point of view, because I'm using it myself. You're eating the dog food. Yeah, me using it and me plus 50 people using it is really not a big difference from my point of view as far as the resources it takes. Right. So that's why I think we can keep the pricing on it as low as very low because I want this to be sustainable. I don't expect this to ever be my full-time job managing this thing. This is more what I would call a utility than a tool, if you know what I mean. Sure. Okay. This is the equivalent of a batch file that you keep that's very handy as opposed to an application you've gone out and written in C++. So what and feel free to be as wibbly, wobbly as you want on this, but what sort of time frame are we looking at coming out of beta? I'm hoping to come out of beta sometime around March. Okay. Because I want to get, right now I've got a lot of people using it. There's a lot of links in the system, but they're not a very diverse group of people using it. I've got ITI marketing people. I've got a few bloggers. I've got a couple of authors, but actually I have a band. Oh, hey. There you go. But I'd like to get a little more diverse. I also would like to, you know, people I have using it are on the, the exception of the marketing people are a little on the techie side. So it's easy for them, I think. And I'd like to get a little more diversity in the user base so I can find out are there rough spots that I can, you know, sand down and make things easier. Right. That takes a little larger of a user base. Well, and now here's maybe a suggestion, something that I think, I know me and my work process. And if I have to copy and paste from one screen to another, that might, I won't say discourage me from using it, but it won't exactly encourage me to use it. Now, if I had something in my browser where I could say, right click on a page and say, send, send the page I'm on to Shogas. We're actually, yeah, we're actually thinking about that. We're talking about doing like a bookmarklet sort of thing. Yes, yes. Yeah. The problem, the reason we haven't done this, we haven't been in a hurry to this is because most of the people, most of the pages that this is used on, the data is not there. So we could do, we could prefill in the URL and maybe grab the page title that was available. Sure. Right. But you still would have to type in the description and frequently that's going to be a matter of copying it from the original page. But that is something we are looking at. I guess that would, I realize you can never completely automate it, but that would at least just purely from my point of view, that would encourage me maybe to use it more if at least it was partially automated. Yeah. Well, one of the things we're talking about doing, if on the, that's not the page, that's the page, and this is something we kind of stopped working on because of the holidays, the main developer myself both got kind of busy. Yeah, it happens. When you put in the URL here, having it going out and grab the title. Okay. Yeah. Just, you know, kind of try to auto fill some stuff. What this does now when you go in here is just make sure that it's a valid URL. Gotcha. You'll see real, I'm not sure if you'll even show up on here, but see there, just that little flag. Right. That's going out and making sure that you're not putting in a bad URL because it won't let you create something that's not, you know, web accessible over HTTP. Another question just came in. How does work if that URL there is a YouTube video? First of all, it would work, but it would actually be better to share the YouTube video directly on Facebook. YouTube provides a very special type of open graph markup for embedding video so it can play in the Facebook feed. Okay. I think it does it on LinkedIn too, I'm pretty sure. I know it does it on YouTube. That's, I would not do that. I would personally not share a, if I wanted people to be able to watch the video on YouTube, I would share the YouTube URL directly. Now, if I wanted to, again, tart it up, you know, make it, you know, give it a makeover and make it a destination as opposed to having it showing the feed, then you could use this. If you put in a URL there to a YouTube video, it would show you're just like any other link. You could put it in a static image so it would show that picture instead of the typical, you know, Facebook grabs a YouTube thumbnail with a little play button on top of it. And again, I'm just drinking all over with my hands. It happens. I'm like, yeah, I like this. So, so, so if, if, if you, if you share the YouTube directly, not using your service, then it would for most services be playable right in the, the, the feed from Facebook or wherever. Whereas if you, if you used it through Shogas, they would then have to click, which would then go to the YouTube page and then play. Yep. Exactly. Like, I'm going to actually give you a quick little, stop, stop that. John Creed is chilling at me. If we go back to the debugging tool that I showed you earlier and do it on a YouTube video, see, they actually include this, which they can get directly from the, because they have the video, they can grab this array. Okay. And this is what's passed into you. This is what's passed into Facebook itself. It allows it to build a player. Okay. Whereas through Shogas, it would just be a static. At this point, we are actually working on video. If you go into the dance link types here, you'll see we're working on being able to embed sound and video. Oh, all right. But probably you have what the video is. It's, we have to be, if you have a website like, you know, of your own and you want to embed video in there, you can do stuff to tell the person, okay, you need this codec, you know, here's how to get it and here's what your browser should do about it. You can't do that on Facebook. So Facebook, you know, it'll, the video will work if the person has the codec, but you can't help them get the codec if they don't have it. Gotcha. Okay. So that's where we keep running into kind of a wall in these. It works sometimes, it depends on the format. Like it'll work for OGG if you're running Mac or Linux, but it won't work in Windows. No, that's right. So these are more not issues with Shogas. These are issues with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. Correct. Yeah, okay. All right. So yeah, you can see in the way, you know, Facebook gets all the right open graph data that it needs from YouTube directly. I wouldn't want to, you know, I wouldn't want Shogas to break that if your goal is to have a person watch the video on Facebook. Now if your goal is to talk about the video and explain why it's awesome and why they should go to your blog post and read and watch the video as well as read your comp, Shogas all the way. Okay. You know, because you know how easy it is to embed a Facebook video on YouTube in WordPress, you know. Right, right. Yeah. Literally put the URL online by itself and it's done. And then you can write up your own, you know, thoughts and commentary about it. And in that case, you know, Shogas would be very handy for getting people to that page. And Myrtle is asking one other question and maybe Myrtle, you can clarify this a little bit. She says, what about using this for posts, not redistribution of say a blog like vacation pics? If you want to take a stab at that, I'm not sure. I'm clear on your question. So if you could clarify that. Does Myrtle have audio? Not that she's told me. Okay. But Myrtle, if you have audio, just say so. Well, we'll happily turn on your microphone. Not a lot of people we've found over the years have been willing to do that. Okay. I happen to know that. Okay. She's on an iPad. So. Okay. She's a webinar pro. Okay. It's kind of an apples and oranges thing here. This is not, you know, you don't share photos directly through this. However, if you had a blog post or web page full of, you know, a gallery of photos. Oh, oh, she's okay. She says we can unmute her. Let's go ahead. Myrtle, you're unmuted. Hi. Can you hear me, JD? Yeah. Hey, Pat. How you doing? Fine. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you, boy. Five minutes with you really blows my mind. Pudgy point of view. Anyway, my, my question, you're right. You got to have the photos somewhere. It could be in a Flickr collection or Picasso collection, you know, album. And, but the concept is in one place, you could design a post and then just keep clicking those buttons for Facebook and Google plus and Twitter and all that. Correct. That you're pulling content from your blog and doing it. So it might actually streamline and I wouldn't copy paste my little comments that go with a picture of my granddad from Christmas. Right. You could, you could set that up. You could, you know, especially if I use Flickr myself and I have you show this to point to a Flickr set or to Flickr slideshow. If you'd like to, if you link directly to a slideshow on Flickr, it doesn't grab the set description. It doesn't grab, it grabs the information for whatever picture is loading first. Makes sense. Yeah. Instead of grabbing the actual description of the set and the title of the set. So I have done that. I've used so this to link directly from Facebook and Twitter to a Flickr slideshow. Okay, cool. So, and also with Flickr, you can, you know, right click on the image and use that, you know, right click on the image and copy the image URL and paste it into Shoga. So you can avoid that whole download and reupload thing. Okay. Very cool. Thanks for sharing this. I picked this up in my main news feed on Facebook because you had an interesting graphic. Thank you. And that's that graphic. Just so you know, that's that's stock photo. That's like, it's part of I either got it from stock photo.com or I stock photo, but it gives the idea. It likes it. People are, I don't want to trick people. It's not something goal, but people's eyes notice when, when something looks pretty. I totally get that. And I found myself doing the, okay, download a cool picture from that other person's blog post so that you can redistribute that and point your followers to that other blog post. So I'm always downloading, then uploading. And this would be very interesting to use. Sure. Because I do a lot of that curating work. Yeah, I know you do. Yeah, you do a great job at that. Everybody who doesn't know Dear Myrtle is, Dear Myrtle is she's, if it comes to genealogy and you have questions or looking for resources, check out her blog, check yours. I did not know she was going to be here, by the way. I had no idea she was registered for this, but I'm probably going to have to pay you extra for that, J.D. Well, and, and I will say, you know, watch out. We might ask you to be a presenter on the show someday. So actually, yeah, it would be great. All right. Thank you for the technology, boy. Okay. Fair enough. We do this every Wednesday, usually, just not these two weeks. So all right, thank you for that. I'm going to go ahead and meet you again. And we have gone past our hour, which we are perfectly capable of doing. But just in the interest of time, I guess, J.D., is there anything else you'd like to tell us, say, here's your chance? So nothing beyond the spot. No, I think I've said everything. I covered everything that I was really concerned that, you know, I was afraid I was going to forget stuff. This URL, by the way, if you want to find out whether or not your site could use this, developers.facebook.com slash tools slash debug. That's the place to go. Like, we'll take a look at, you know, Michael's blog, run it through there. And this shows you what Facebook scrapers are going to see. So if somebody shared it today, we'd get, you know, this nice set of information based on what he's got up there today. You get the idea. And I am, as we speak, adding that to a link here so that that will show up in our show notes for anybody who missed that. And so this is where usually more than one person is kind of handy, because Krista would be doing this as I'm talking. Now I'm trying to do both of them at the same time, and, you know, it works to various degrees. So all right, J.D., thank you very much. This was wonderful. I think I'm going to definitely be taking maybe a third look at this. I know I have an account. Yes, you do. And it's just the way I, you know, I've automated as much of this as I can, but I can definitely see some uses for this. And it sounds like from our audience many other people have seen uses for this. So hopefully you get a few more beta testers out of this for that. So if any of you guys are listening, sign up, drop me an email. Can you give them my J.D.T. at that address? If everybody can see that. Now I've got to get to the right screen here to the chat thing. J.D.T. at Yargon, which is like bargain, but with a Y instead of a G. I mean instead of a B. All right. Just drop me an email if you create an account on here and I will activate it that once you've validated your email address, your account is not active until I actually make it so. Okay. So it's J.D.T. at jargon, Y-A-R-G-A-I-N dot com. Correct. And we'll throw that in there. All right. Well, thank you very much. I am going to go ahead and take control back for just a minute or two here. I usually have a couple of extra things I like to show and I'm going to go ahead and get on my, you need to be writing using good passwords, soapbox yet again. I tend to do that almost once a month here or something like that, but with things that have happened lately. So thank you, J.D. I'm going to go ahead and take control back here and I want to show this screen. So I just have one particular link I'm going to show here and this is have you been, have I been pwned.com? There have been a lot of security breaches lately. Target is, I'll mention that one, but that's credit card data, not email addresses and passwords. We'll watch that. But as you can see here, 152 million accounts from Adobe were hacked recently and Gawker and Yahoo. And for librarians that Adobe One is very important, especially because if you have an Adobe ID for eBooks, eBook DRM, Overdrive, that sort of thing. So all you need to do is type in your email address here and click Pwned and it will tell you whether or not your account was accessed or your account information was accessed. And in my case, both through Adobe and for Gawker. So I needed to change both of those passwords and change any passwords that may have been similar to that. So maybe in a future episode, I'll be talking about some services that you can use. I've been using LastPass for the last couple of months and creating nice complex passwords and not having to remember them, things like that. So if you're thinking, oh no, my passwords are good. My passwords are safe. You might want to check out this website and see if they aren't as safe as you think they are. So with that, I'm going to give JD one last thanks and welcome everybody to join us on the next Encompass Lives. They are usually on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. Central Time as it has been this week and will be again next week. They are on Thursday due to the holidays and next week we'll be talking about Beyond Mark, BibFrame, and the future of bibliographical data. So we have social data going on today and bibliographic next week and then we've got internships coming up, hot titles for cold month. I'll be on that. We're going to be doing some book talks, passive programming for teens and tweens, and then our next tech talk, which has yet to be determined for January on the 29th. So if you have any ideas, just let me know. Also, we do have a Facebook page. So if you are a Facebook user, feel free to follow us at Encompass Live on Facebook and there you will be able to find all of the information about upcoming shows and reminders that we're about to go live and things like that. So once again, I want to thank everybody for attending and JD for talking to me today and we will see you next week on the next episode of Encompass Live. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.