Integration.

I'm just an amateur in doing all this stuff. I started this blog, only in February 2010. I do not know much about HTML or CSS, let alone Java. What I have is the ability, to sit down, hours on end, reading documentation about programming stuff. Yes, my hobby is that boring. Even my wife can't understand, how I can spend so much time on it. Brought to you by Gazali at www dot gazali dash ahmad dot c o dot c c. Proclivity for objectivity.
Let's start with this blog. The blog platform itself is free. Its from Google Blogger. The template I use is also free. Its called "Evidens White" by Design Disease. And the work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. What it means is that, I can use it and make any changes I like. The only thing that I have to do, is to leave the credits on the footer.

There are thousands and thousands of templates for you to use. Some free, some need to be paid. Those that you paid for, are even more fantastic. I sometimes feel like a boy in a candy store, who's free to choose anything he wants.

Most of the pictures I use, are from Flickr and its also under a Creative Commons License. The photographers are a fantastic bunch. That's why all of the pics are credited to the photographers. You could say that this blog happens because of all the sharing done by these people.

What you need to do, is figure out your content. Nobody can help you with that. You can have the most astounding flash website; people will visit it. If the content never change, most would visit it once only. Yes, you could argue that there are billions of users worldwide, what we need is quality, not quantity.

I've decided on a blog instead of a static webpage. I've done some design work for webpages, though I find updating the content is a bit tedious. Change the content, upload it, check, redo again, upload again, check. Its just a pain in the neck. A blog is much more easier to upload content.

In fact, I found out that a Wordpress blog can even be a static website. Even Blogger, have the ability to display static pages. So you can upload your products there, or some other stuff. Example of static pages here, are "My Story", "Chronicles" and "Free Ebooks".

Next, comes Facebook. Initially, I was skeptical about it. You know, giving out all of your stuff online to "The Man". I had a Facebook account last year. I deleted it. Only in February 2010, that I restarted the account again.

It was actually a "a-ha" thing. I did a lot of reading and research and I found out that its pretty hard to ignore a social web app with 400 million users. In fact, there were others too, like FriendFeed and MySpace. Though I find them a bit problematic. FriendFeed can't keep up with the numbers and MySpace allows full customizations, it was like Geocities. You have the most garishly designed webpages. My eyes hurt when I see it.

Facebook adopts a unified interface. You can't change a lot of the stuff. The only thing that you can change is your profile pics. And it works. This just proves one thing. By giving the users limited choices, the users are free to concentrate on connecting with other people. That probably explains the phenomenal growth of Facebook. Of course, the servers must not crash.

In Facebook, you have the ability to create a page for your business, causes, groups or whatever. Your personal profile is limited to 5,000 friends, Fan pages, unlimited.

In fact, Facebook is actually your web presence. My url for personal face book page  is http://www.facebook.com/Gazali.Ahmad, my fan page, http://www.facebook.com/Gazali.Thoughts. And Facebook can function as some sort of a mini blog. How? By using the Notes application. Hey, Facebook is not only about games, ok. Here's an example. And people need not to be logged on to Facebook to read it.

Being the tinkerer, I created my own fan page. Once again, content is king and time is short. I have 1 wife, 4 kids, 1 rabbit and a pond of fishes to manage on top of my other work. For blogs, its not a problem, the update frequency can even be as little as once a month.

Why I choose a fan page page instead of a group page? I can put up a custom tab. In my fanpage the custom tabs are "Welcome", "Free & Cheap", "World Cup 2010" and "Contact Info". And each have its own web address.

Facebook, its like a river. Things move fast. And I don't want to be tied up updating my Fanpage status. So I did the next best thing. Signed up for Alltop, choose the relevant categories, and direct the feed to Facebook. Hey, I even became a fan of my own fanpage. I read the articles.

With Facebook, I linked it to my blog. Not only that, I linked my blog to my twitter, linkedin and youtube account.

And with some code additions for JavaScript SDK and creating a Facebook application, I got the facebook "Like Box" on my blog. Don't ask me what's a JavaScript SDK, I have not read about it yet, just know that it works.

So there you have it. Tight integration done by an amateur.

FaceBook <--link--> Facebook FanPage <--link--> Blog <--link--> Twitter <--link--> LinkedIn <--link--> Youtube.

Just imagine what it can do for your business.

Photo Credits: "Britain Going Blog Crazy - Metro Article" by Annie_Mole.