 Good morning everyone. This is Michael Sauer 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 Sauer's, 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 are 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 I host 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. So, why don't you tell us what you've 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, you know, 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 showcase 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 say you might want your library logo, you might want, you know, picture an e-book. 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 if a person 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 ShowGus 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 9 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 early 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. What... 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. This is mainly... The main purpose for this is things that are going to be... How can I put this? If things look right when you share them, don't do it. Well, they don't always. I will say that. Right. Like, in your... 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. You know, 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 service 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. But it also goes to your original resource. But the main reason I started doing this is because we had to share PDFs, for example. You know, 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 crafting where they're teaching you about the history of mosaics and actually make them. It doesn't look good. That is the same event. They both take you to the same place. Neither one involved happened to contact the web developer for the library and say, 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. This is how long it would 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 does to reach out and tell people about stuff. 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. By creating a showcase link on top of that, we can link to each part of that page and have the right information. 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 find a lot of libraries share things like PDFs directly. If you were to go into the Philly jobs section, there's a ton of PDFs there on how to make a good resume, a 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. Dear Myrtle, I'm going to hold the one question you have, maybe more towards the end in this case for that one. Let's say you sold us here. How do I actually use it? What's involved, that sort of thing? 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, S-H-O-G-E-S, 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 will 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. If you decide you don't want to use the service once it goes live and costs money, it won't ever cost much. I'm planning on keeping this dirt sheet because I want people to use it. Anything you create will stay live. I'll interject there. What's the hurdles question? How much? Hey, Pat. We're going to be talking probably, we're guessing like 20 a year. Okay. For a basic use. And that'll be for up to like 500 links. If you go above that, we may have to add, start selling additional links. A couple of 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. The Facebook publisher would be your page. The author would be you yourself. Your Twitter information. These are all defaults. All the Twitter 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? TravelandLibrarian.info, yep. Yes, you could create a C name called links.travelandlibrarian.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. There's, you would set up a C name pointing to domains.shubis.shub.us. If you can't do a C name, you can use the IP address. I'd much rather use a C name. That just sends all traffic for that. Links.travelandlibrarian.info to us. And then our service takes over processing the individual links. Okay, and 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. I'm not going to do it. No, I know who that is. In my case, it's Dottster. You would see where it lets you create new records and you probably already have a www.travelandlibrarian. 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. Travelandlibrarian. And then for the destinations where you would put domains.shubis. I didn't show you that when I was doing a new link. If I create a link by default, mine links to techfind.org, which is my own personal domain that I've had since 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 dot com. Just because it's fun to say. I'm telling people to go to htp 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. So if I set this up, they would see links.travelandlibrarian.info but it would redirect through you guys anyways. Right. You know how 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 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 treatbot. So if it's treatbot, 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 can 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, it instead feeds it at an interstitial page that'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 job seeker URL is shared. There's no description for the page, so it has to guess. It doesn't know what image it just sees. There's three on the page and 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 a 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 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. You just use the validation tool by putting in your first short URL you created on Shogus. 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. If we're a worker, 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. Actually, that's what I was just doing. Yeah, this is a tweet card thing and how to get a tweet card validated is all handled here. If everybody 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 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 one I was in 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 a Facebook and Twitter. It's also linked in. If you have a Tumblr and share one of those URLs you'll see it on there that they 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 go because you just you just threw in Tumblr there which is good. What services will this post do? Right now. You can post a link to anything. The ones that it's going to give you the biggest benefit for are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Those are the ones that actually make use of the metadata that you're adding in by creating these links. 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 everything and for the picture. But they don't use the description data. I don't know if anybody has noticed that Google Plus for some reason stopped grabbing text when you share a link. They expect you to put any text 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 the whole page real quick here. Okay. This is where we want the people to go. And here's a problem. You don't really have a picture on here that's suitable for your whole page but we are going to just grab a picture just so we can have one. I'm a little more impressed. 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. This 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. What is your blog called, Michael? The Traveling Librarian. Like that? Yep. 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. When I created the link to the event today I had to go look it up every time. And we're just going to grab some text here. Obviously you can do this however you wanted but add a description and we're just going to call this Traveling Librarian and what's your M-Sauer? M-Sauer, 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 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. I will also share this on Facebook. These are strictly these are from the add this service if you're unfamiliar with it. I don't know because it makes it really easy. These are set up to automatically grab this URL and not this URL. Yes, yes. 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 but that's fine. 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. It has exactly what we told it to use. And then back to Facebook it's down here off to my page and there's 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. 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. Once you have the stuff that you want to use to create it so if you created a nice little graphic designer to make a nice little logo for your mic you can actually upload it to your show this account in your profile and you wouldn't have to deal with the image thing at all you can just go and grab it and like I said you can throw 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 I selected those five forever and ever. And then if back to the page where you were sharing from I saw a a you had the twitter logo the facebook logo and then there's a plus well and then there's a plus plus oh and again this is part of add this I would not particularly use these the way the add this system works you could try it it depends on the system it depends on whether or not systems use um open graph or not. So you're using yet somebody else's service to do those buttons. 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 we chose which of these to show here like at me I haven't done a google plus one in a while so it's because google plus doesn't grab a 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 two right yeah you know I had 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 there's some something they were changing but then I realized 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 next question um well yeah I'll just take this moment to remind some of you have been typing in questions we've gotten a couple of comments uh deal 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 post 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 um 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 um 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 um so what I eventually I will I will ask you maybe to explain a little under the hood a little bit but what what sort of statistics if anything can I get out of this is there any benefit to me from there it 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 trying to get people to go vote for them and they got 149 clicks from human beings based on this um not scrapes by robots and that sort of thing um 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 these are actual people you know they're these are not um the clicks strictly apply to people who clicked on them on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn so 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 and that I think about it I probably should have but yeah that's that's this that's what's available to you there um I kind of mentioned it earlier but this is a good example of what I was talking about um about being able to get more life out of your out of a single link um for most of the time that we've been promoting this event since we first talked about this what in October was it um the URL that people were supposed to go to was actually the encompassed live site um where they could register but once that closed I changed the destination to go directly to the go to meeting sign up page and I just did that by going into it and changing the link here so you can have you know if an event um is over like when this one's over and um Christa puts the YouTube the video up right I might go in here and change the link to point to that okay 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 sign up page or even farther back to the um announcement page right and then that way you're 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 because this link like show this you know the end cup slide this this URL here um because that URL is what's going out to the world where this URL redirects to in this case you know that link today um is under our control entirely right so we can we can make that go anywhere so if it's um you know if I want to link to a um preliminary program for computers and libraries okay um because the final program is not out yet when the final program comes out I can just go in here and re-point 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 automatically go to the latest information and we just 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 um like I just said like you know pointing to a different location after an event is over hmm I was going to show you that actually here was the um 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-aligned in the show let's take okay so we can see that 14 people have clicked on the link Michael I'm going to grab your slug here and this is the actual you know um this is the actual server so I'm going to tell it that I want to see all the um traffic to that slug and we can look here and see actually first let's do the um 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 um um flip board has seen it because this is actually somebody takes one of these links and scrapes it it'll look right in a flip board presentation but I don't do that personally so I haven't um 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 flip board okay got it right okay you can see like this is a this is a pull so somebody grabbed this and because their um user agent was flip board 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 a lot fewer people but these are the people who actually um were redirected to your site so these are some people on google plus clicked on that link um people on facebook that was the facebook short URL um 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'm assuming you can't do this yet so let'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 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 in the main reason is because these are not discreet to you you this this information um 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 oh yeah yeah I'm just trying to think if it would be worth it because what you really you know what would be of most for use for you would be something like Google Analytics at the destination and because those are the people that fully load the page and you know and bang the analytics script hmm whereas this 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 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 and I see I she uses a system she was one of the very first base on here if you wanted to do that if it really mattered that much to you clone this and oh create different links that you share to the different services exactly okay I yeah so then I've got I've got the one I share to Facebook the one I share to Google plus the one I share to Twitter and then and then on your links page here and you can have as many as you want you're not gonna 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 god if it matters that much to you I personally have I mean in all 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 I know people who would I do you that's it and we've got a comment that 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 very strict marketing purposes as opposed to the aesthetic purpose is involved I can 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 now Facebook is a little more you know Twitter is extremely casual because you know 140 characters right Facebook is kind of like the the mama bear you can kind of be casual but you can also be a little pro and then tech and then LinkedIn is more papa bearish right definitely pro there yeah so in that case you know create the first link clone it you know and then make it target audience sure and another comment thanks for the friendly gooey this stuff is fascinating but scary looking so I think when we're you were gripping the server logs there yeah the 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 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 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 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 so so let me ask you this when you were when you when you first started explaining this this is kind of got 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 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 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 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 shut up yet it's still not there it goes see it just takes a while for them to process the image but here's the big thing okay if you share 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'm probably following you by a libtop is what it is probably yeah 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 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 let's not call it an accident accidentally works you're making a bigger target of your content right yeah okay oh so alright so let's talk under the hood for a few minutes so I mean and I'll just start with what languages is written in anything else you may or may not want to show us under the hood not really I mean it's not that complicated stuff and there's really nothing which 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 grabbing 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 a 3 by 4 image like the traditional 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 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 it helps you 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 I don't think so stuff right really going for a full marketing not the writing of it but the using of this tool I write my content and 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 content going out that doesn't share again 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 you a lot of frequent content hold on one second I don't want to cough in you guys I'm just saying 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 it's just I put it on these services just to do it whereas somebody in a business or a 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 if you're looking for a tagline for your service making a bigger target for your content that doesn't make a note of that because that really is what it does the destination is the same it's just a matter of putting maybe it's good that we're doing this unboxing day really all about the wrapping of the presents 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 I can see where stuff came from but it's not 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 I just wanted to make it defensive for a minute 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 what's your terms of service I guess it's interesting there's nothing that we're collecting and there's nothing that we're using that you're not using that we're not giving back to you like those accounts 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 I should I'm sure it's not very long there's not a lot I didn't worry too much about that just because we're not collecting we're not in a position to collect a lot of data we're basically just we're essentially bitly on steroids I suppose leads me to another question which may not be answerable but 2013 seems to have been the year that service is 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 .hcaccess file that would handle all the redirections for your links if we ever shut down you can just append it to your all you have to do is point your links .travelnibrarian.info back to your main site and then just append this to the end of your hcaccess file so if anybody hit those slugs it would redirect them to wherever you told them to go in the first place 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 take out sort of I'm putting it on the profile where you can just download it at will it's generating that is not 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 it's one of those things that I can essentially just pull out a report for you and if you save that text file you're good to go and once I do that I'll obviously put an addition to the FAQ and how to use it and you have to be able to edit your hcaccess file so we're talking another level there I'm not sure I could but I know the guy who would be able to for me I'm going to show you the idea if I can here 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 in the long run I thought I had it redirected here ooh more code yeah this is an hcaccess file for a blog you remember when I talked about this stuff Michael oh yeah this is blocking access this is a WordPress blog it's 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 yeah an hcaccess 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 c-name 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 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 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 sure this is the equivalent of a batch file that you keep very handy as opposed to an application you've gone out and written in C++ so what 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 am hoping to come out of beta sometime around March because I want to get right now I've got a lot of people using it there's a lot of links to the system they're not a very diverse group of people using it I've got, you know, ITI marketing people I've got a few bloggers I've got I've got a couple of authors but I actually have a band oh hey there you go but I'd like to get a little more diversity so I also would like to the 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 stand down and make things easier 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 the page I'm on to show us we're actually thinking about um that we're talking about doing like a bookmarklet sort of thing 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 if it was available 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 could 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 or you know 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 it happens you know when you put in the URL here having it going out and grab the title okay just 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 flat 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 web accessible over HGP another question just came in what how does it work if you 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 videos so it can play in the Facebook feed 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 make it a destination as opposed to having it show in 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 if if you if you if you share the YouTube directly not using your service then it would for most services be playable right in the feed from Facebook or wherever whereas if you if you used it through show us they would then have to click which would then go to the YouTube page and then play yep exactly like I'm gonna actually give you a quick little stop stop that John Cree 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 and this is what's passed into you this is what's passed into Facebook itself it allows it to build a player okay where whereas through show us it would just be a static YouTube 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 there probably have the video is it's we have to be if you have a website like you know of your own 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 a kind of a wall and it works sometimes it depends on the format like it'll work for OGG if you're running a Mac or Linux but it won't work in Windows so these are more not issues with show us these are issues with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn correct yeah okay alright so yeah you can see in the way you know Facebook gets all the right open graph data that needs from from YouTube directly I wouldn't want to you know I wouldn't want show us 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 show us 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 you're done and then you can write up your own thoughts and commentary about it and in that case you know show this to 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 picks if you want to take a stab at that I'm not sure I'm clear on your question so if you clarify that does Myrtle have audio not that she's told me okay but Myrtle if you have audio just say so we'll happily turn on your microphone not a lot of people we found over the years have been willing to do that I'm just saying because I happen to know that okay she's on an iPad so okay she's the webinar pros 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 a web page full of you know a gallery of photos oh oh she's okay she says we can unmute her let's let's go ahead Myrtle you're unmuted hi can you hear me JD yeah hey Pat how you doing fine Merry Christmas Merry Christmas to you boy five minutes you really blows my mind haji point of view anyway my my question you're right you gotta have the photos somewhere it could be in a Flickr collection or Picasso collection you know album um 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 it's your 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 the picture of my grand after from Christmas right you could you could set that up you know especially if I use Flickr myself um and I have you show this to point to a Flickr set Flickr slide show if you link directly to a slide show on Flickr you can grab the set description it doesn't grab it grabs the information for whatever picture is loading first instead of grabbing the actual description of the set and the title of the set so I have done that I've used show this to um link directly from Facebook and Twitter to a Flickr slide show cool and also with Flickr you can um right click on the image and use that right click on the image and copy the image URL and paste it in the show so you can avoid that whole download and re-upload thing 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 um I either got it from stockphoto.com or iStockphoto but it it gives the idea people are I don't want to trick people it's not something cool 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 you because I do a lot of that curating work mm-hmm yeah I know you do I'm 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 I did not know she was going to be here by the way no idea she was registered for this but I'm probably going to have to pay you extra for that JB 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'd be great all right thank you for the technology boy fair enough we do this every Wednesday usually just not these two weeks so all right thank you for that I'm going to 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 JD is there anything else you'd like to tell us say here's your chance 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 Michael's blog run it through there and this shows you what Facebook scrapers are going to see so some of you shared or today we get you know this nice set of information based on what he's got up there today 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 we 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 alright JD 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 just is the way 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 JDT that address if everybody can see that now I got to get to the right screen here to the chat thing JDT at jargon which is like bargain but with a Y instead of a G I mean instead of a B just drop me an email if you create an account on here and I will activate it once you've validated your email address your account is not active until I actually make it so so it's JDT at jargon Y-A-R-G-A-I-N dot com and we'll throw that in there alright 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 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 so box 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 JD 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 dot 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 but 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 DRM overdrive that sort of thing so all you need to do is type in your email address here and click Pwn 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 last past 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 am 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, Bib Frame and the future bibliographical data so we had social data going on today and bibliographic next week and then we've got internships coming up, hot titles for a 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 with Encompass Live on Facebook and there you will be able to find all of the information about upcoming shows and reminders that were 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