23 | February | 2010 | Advocate's Studio

By now, most people have heard about or have actually customized their Twitter page and / or created a Twitter landing page for people clicking on the link shown on their Twitter page. But did you know that you could customize your Facebook Business page too? Facebook pages, by default, look rather, well, blandly uniform. Not anymore! With the addition of a special FB application that allows you to manipulate FBML (Facebook Markup Language), you can create a page worthy of Coca Cola or Disney or Lady GaGa.

The application that powers this process is called “Static FBML” (link here). What it does is create a blank canvas that can be filled with your own graphics and links. You will need to go into the settings for the application and make a few selections as to how the information is presented (box or tab), hit the edit to add your content via a standard text entry box, modify the title of the box or tab, and start entering the content. You can make it the default landing spot by editing your page settings.

I make it sound simple, but there is a little bit of effort to it. Hey, as any woman will tell you, it’s hard work being beautiful! Seriously, though, for a more thorough explanation for how it works, head over to the Mashable! article where I found the goods (link here) or Tamar Weinberg’s article on FBML (link here).

Hat tip to Mashable!

Google Reader remains, by far, the most popular RSS feed reader out there. I rely on it heavily, both in its direct form and as the back bone of my other reading sources, such as Feedly and other information-consuming applications.

One of the complaints comparisons often bandied about the Web regarding GReader is that it is painfully slow to update feeds with new publication, now that we have such hyperactive services such as Twitter. Real time speed (“RTS”) is often considered a “good” thing among Webizens. I, for one, prefer curated content from dependable sources to RTS and have always preferred to sacrifice a wee bit of speed for reliability.

Until now. Techy people already know about the PubSubHubbub protocol which enables the transfer of RSS feed publications at RTS. I don’t know enough about these technicalities to even attempt to explain the how of it. But I do know that the protocol has been rolling out via various Web applications, speeding things up wherever it lands.

Late last week, commenters noticed GReader delivering information from feeds enabled with PubSubHubbub at a much faster rate. Apparently, GReader is now reading and relaying PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds in real time. Most major on-line publications have already adopted the protocol so the GReader experience has definitely picked up as a result.

What does this mean to content creators? Well, you too can jump on the PubSubHubbub bandwagon with your blog and supply the world’s most popular reader with your writing in real time. If you use Blogger or Posterous, your feeds are already PubSubHubbub-enabled. If you use the WordPress software on your own hosted site, you can install this PubSubHubbub plug-in (link here). If you are slogging away over at WordPress.com, you unfortunately are out of luck at the moment – they have adopted the competing rssCloud format, which is not yet supported in GReader. If you use Feedburner to send your RSS feed, turn on Google’s Pingshot to send out information in real time.

What are you waiting for? Not GReader anymore!

Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb (they so smart).