Bryon and Jon Demonstrate Being Social

We've made a few changes to Site Builder and our Blog system that are worth sharing with you. Indeed, we should probably Pin a Tweet to our Wall and throw it in one of our Circles.

We've upgraded the Sharing feature of Site Builder and the Blogs to allow for the inclusion of a Twitter handle. This is your Twitter ID, the name following the "@" symbol. You can use a Twitter ID to locate a profile on their site, like this example: http://twitter.com/ANRWebGuy.

On the the page properties of your "home page," you can set the default Twitter handle for your site. If you have "sharing" enabled, any time someone shares to Twitter, your ID will go along for the ride, identifying you as the source of the content! You can override the site Twitter Handle by entering a different handle on any page (on the page properties form). This will allow you to have several Tweeters on the same site.

This functionality was also shared with ANR Blogs. Like Site Builder, you can add your handle to the blog information page as a default, and then each post will accept a unique handle. Go ahead and click the share button at the top of this post and select Twitter. You'll see that @ANRWebGuy is in the tweet!

Additionally, the Blog system received a few things Site Builder has had for a while. Each blog post now has a "small" URL, which is http://ucanr.edu/b/XXXX (where XXXX is the post number). For example, this post has this small URL: http://ucanr.edu/b/8944. Moreover, we removed the sharing link for Digg, since Digg is Deadd, and created sharing links for Pinterest and Google+. Please note, your blog post must have an image to share with Pinterest. This is their requirement! 

Going back to Site Builder, you'll see that Web/IT News posts relating to Site Builder, Blogs and the Survey System are now featured on your dashboard. Hopefully, this will help you stay current with new features and give you greater access to us!

Lastly, the calendar asset in Site Builder was modified a few months ago to gather specific locations for events. This allows us to gather the coordinates for every event happening in ANR (that is posted to Site Builder, of course). It also allows us to convert the location into into a link to a map and directions page! Here's an example of this location link in action: http://ucanr.edu/?calitem=176690. Be sure to include your full locations in your events to take advantage of this feature!