Tech Geek

A quick update to last week's post. If you wondered (or are still wondering) what Twitter is, check out the short film at http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter . The Common Craft folks have done an excellent job of explaining what Twitter is and why you might want to use it. They have some other great videos there as well!

This week I want to take a look at badges that you put on your blog or website to show your online status or latest status updates. I don't have much of a blog myself, but I'm going to point you to it so that you can see what I'm talking about. Visit http://pastorandy.blogspot.com/ and look at the right column which updates dynamically depending on what I'm doing online.

At the top of the column, underneath my profile, you see my Facebook Profile Badge. This is a small bit of HTML that I pasted into a section on my blogger page. To get your own, visit http://www.facebook.com/badges.php while you're logged into Facebook. There you create your badge and get the HTML that you will paste onto your site. There are options for vertical and horizontal badges displaying as much or as little information as you wish. It's all updated to reflect your latest Facebook status.

Next you'll see the Twitter Updates section. I have this set to display my last five Twitter updates, which are also my last five Facebook status messages. To get this one, I visited http://twitter.com/badges/ and clicked the appropriate links to get a badge for Blogger.

The Online Status section contains my Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk badges. They're all clumped together because I was tired of adding individual sections!

The Skype one comes from http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/ where you enter your Skype username and choose a button type to get the HTML code. I like the one that shows my online status to blog visitors.

The Yahoo Messenger one comes from http://messenger.yahoo.com/addpresence.php where you put in your Yahoo ID to get the HTML code.

Finally, the Google Talk one comes from visiting http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New while logged into Google. You get the HTML code and paste it in.

I haven't had too much of a problem with extra SPIM or SPAM from these badges, but if you're nervous about putting your Skype username, Yahoo ID, or Google ID out on the web, you might not want to use these features.