The Dealy News

For those of you who have your own websites, you know how important marketing yourself can be. Most people use social media to further their digital networks. Having links to your individual avenues often does not directly translate to likes or follows. In order to combat this, Facebook has long had their like button coding available for developers. Twitter now has their new “one click follow” button that now serves the same purpose. Here’s how to do get the codes for both:

Facebook Like Button:

Go to the Facebook Developer Center to the plugin area and click on the Like Button section. It is completely customizable and easy to use. It will autopopulate any information from your page once you provide the URL. You can customize what is viewable, like the current fan count and their photos. Click “get code” after you finish setting the perambulators and it will enable you to choose iframe coding or xfbml.

Twitter Follow Button:
Go to the Twitter Resource Area and click on the Follow Button. Provide your desired username and it will produce the coding for you.

We recommend the use of these buttons to help your users stay plugged in and give you instant response. While we are on the subject, click either of our following buttons if you would like to stay connected to the Dealy. We love to be liked.

So, with the discussion over image formats yesterday, we thought it would be cool to go over how to make an animated gif. Here is a step by step tutorial to get you moving.

1. Open Photoshop and create a new document (any size you want as long as it’s a web friendly size)

2. Paste all of the images you intend to use on separate layers.

3. Click the window tab and select animation.

4. Once the dialog box at the bottom of the screen appears (and if you prefer), press the convert to frame animation setting.

5. Open the animation option menu by clicking the pull down in the right corner of the animation dialog box and select “make frames from layers” from the pull down.

this should populate the animation dialog box with each individual frame

6. Choose time intervals for each frame by clicking on the frame’s drop down seen in the lower right corner of each pane.

7. After getting all of the frames set, choose what interval you want your animation to loop in.

8. When you’re ready – save for web and devices.

9. Last but not least – post your new animated gif to the web

Now you can create your own fun animations – we encourage you to get rockin!