This is something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few months and I finally have enough of a thought about to put words to screen. Today, I would like to discuss with you, the fine donburnside.com readership, the like button.

The Like Button is what I’m going to call the process in which, at certain sites, you mark something in such a way to signify the fact that you appreciate it. The favorite star on Flickr, the pink heart on Tumblr, or the star on Twitter. Clicking that device tells the author that you liked it while at the same time acts as a bookmark for you, within that site, for the stuff that you really like. And that’s exactly how I use it. I like things because I think they are cool and I want to be able to go back to them at a later time for whatever reason.

Did you notice that I did not include the Facebook like function in the above paragraph? It’s because I think that feature is broken.

On Facebook, clicking like only lets the author of the post know that you like it and automatically subscribes you to updates on that post (if you have those settings enabled). That’s too bad.

There are posts all the time on Facebook that I wish I could revisit for many reasons. Funny posts, cool links or videos. But when I click the like button, the only thing that happens is I get bothered with updates and comments that I’m usually not interested in.

I don’t have a solution for this but really wish I did. I would be nice to have an archive of likes on Facebook, just like the other sites.

Maybe someday.

Does this feature exist? Do you have a good system? Let us know below! Comments are back open, go nuts!

Good morning internet. How was your weekend? Mine was great, thanks for asking!

Last week Facebook updated their privacy settings again. I would bet that most of you just clicked through and ignored them like you usually do.

You shouldn’t have done that.

If you’ve never modified your privacy settings before, congratulations! All of your profile information is now 100% open to the public, completely searchable by sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Exciting stuff, right?

Wait? What? You don’t want your information to be public? Now would be a great time to click the settings link in the top right hand corner of your screen and choose the option called Privacy Settings. It’s going to take a few minutes and you can even preview your public profile to tune it just right. And you can change the privacy settings on your photo galleries while you are there too. Good times! Finally, when you are doing this, you can even preview your public profile so you can really fine tune the settings.

Now, before anyone gets all crazy over this, just relax. Facebook isn’t automatically indexing your information on Google or the other search sites, they are just making your information publicly available so that the search sites (among others. Google your name to see more) will be able to see your profile. It’s really not that big of a deal and definitely isn’t something that requires ALL CAPITAL LETTERS AND MAKE SURE YOU REPOST THIS ON YOUR PROFILE FACEBOOK IS A BIG EVIL MONSTER GAAAAHHHHHH! Back in the shop we call that F.U.D. And nobody likes that.

Have a great week! It was nice to see you again. We should get together to do this again soon.

Don’t be a stranger.

Don

There are times when I do things just to get to you guys, you know that right? The toot above is a great example of that.

I guess the new Facebook app for the ATP was released this week. All over my Facebook page was post after nerdgasm post proclaiming how awesome it was. Twitter too. It was everywhere. One of the posts said it had to be installed twice, so I thought I would pick on that and run with it.

Holy crap.

You ATP fanboys sure love your phone. More than a few of you got 17 different kinds of defensive about that particular toot. I found it comical to say the least. At least it provided my fingers something to make the sound about today.

First off, it’s an application. For a telephone. That serves no other purpose than to help you access the time-suck that is known at Facebook. I have no doubt it is the raddest thing ever, but when I have to read that it is the raddest thing ever 50 times over, I just can’t sit by and watch.

So, I posted the above tweet.

One thing I already don’t like about it. You remember when you got your ATP, right? Every email was stamped ’sent from my iphone’ until so many people called douche that you turned it off. Now the new FB app has that ‘feature’. Please let me be the first.

Douche! Turn it off please.

As always, thank you for your time.

That doesn’t mean you can’t criticize my work or provide feedback. On any of the items I post you are more than welcome to scrape, grab, hotlink or download any of it and post it to your site. Or link back to my stuff. Or, and this is new, friend me up at Facebook.

I have setup a new FriendFeed account and have linked up only the sites that don’t have comments (including the tumblr). I have also activated the FriendFeed app on Facebook so everything I post will go right into my news feed.

I think for now this is a pretty good solution. Of course, if you would like to add your 2-bits, go right ahead.

UPDATE: If you are a facebook user, you can login using the button on the right to post a comment as well.

From Archchef at casualgaminformer.com comes this question.

Is there a way to disable the “Last visitors” section in the widget? I don’t exactly want nor need it but can’t find any way of killing the darn thing

This one is very easy. To remove the part of the widget you don’t want to see, open fbconnect_widget.php and scroll down to line 31, or there about. There are 2 lines below that, remove them, save and upload. You should be good to go. If you want the code, leave a comment below and I’ll hook you up.

I know the plugin still isn’t 100% here. I hope to have that fixed before I go to Vegas this coming weekend.

[video deleted]

Found out today, that time is only 15 seconds off of what the guys are on the Varsity squad are swimming. Not bad for a kid who has only seen about 2 weeks of pool time!

And, make it worthwhile. Click the HD button. Exactly why I bought the Canon HF100 right there friends.

I’ve got more than a few things to get done today. I spent the better part of the week sitting on my hands for the most part and getting nothing done except for a few lackluster workouts.

Well, maybe that is not entirely correct. I did get a few things done this week.

• Got another website customer, and another possible is in the works.
• Created a new business card. Printing them next week.
• Upgraded the iMac to 4GB of RAM. All I can say is holy crap!
• Sent my resume out 5 times
• Gave serious thought towards getting serious about starting my own company
• Napped
• Made another video to test iMovie ‘09. More on this later.
• Made an episode of THCS. I need to order a new mixer bad.
• Spent more time that I care to admit on Facebook

I can tell you about this site, which is cool. It’s a site for an old time Hot Rod guy (like, one of the pioneers of the whole thing) with cool photos and some history. He recently passed away and his family wants to be able to post old articles and photos and all that. Perfect job for Wordpress. I’ll let you know when it’s done so you can check it out.

I also have changes coming to this site. I put together some really cool stuff when I was ‘at the job’ and one of them was the coda slider. I’m going to try to incorporate into this site for latest posts, portfolio snippets, video and a contact form on the home page. Watch for that.

Go watch the video. It’s funny. I might post it here, but I forgot to not cuss, so maybe not.

I spent a good part of the day setting up the Facebook Connect plugin over at Motoringfile. I also set it up here, but haven’t spent nearly as long tweaking it. That means it’s personal wiki time! Weeeeeee

This plug-in does require a few things to work correctly.

You need to add this to the html line in header.php.

Also in the header you should have

In the footer, you need

Your theme should be widgetized. There is a code chunk at the plugin site if it’s not. I’ll be writing this up soon as well.

Once you do everything you need to do to get the plugin installed and configured so it works in your theme, then it’s time to make it look good in your theme as well.

The easiest way to do this is to copy the style from index.php. This includes the call to header.php and any styles that happen before the loop. You will also want to grab the call to footer.php. Paste all of that into the top and bottom of the following files.

• myhome.php

• community.php

• userprofile.php

• invitefriends.php

Once that is done, it should fit nicely into your theme. Don’t look at this one, yet. Go over and check it out at Motoringfile.com instead.

Finally, if you want to remove the check from the box in the comments, you will need to edit fbConnectInterface.php. Find the following line on or around line 47.

And remove the part that says

checked="checked"

I am available for questions or to assist you should you need it.

First one is I am going to attempt to do a Flickr 365. It’s perfect. I spend a little time thinking about the shot then take it. Bonus if I can do it with my phone, then I don’t have to offload photos from a memory stick everyday.

The ‘rents are out again (hi Mom!). That usually provides a pretty good level of distraction as well which I am welcoming this time around. Thursday night for example Mom showed me her photos and is bummed that she can’t upload all of them to her Flickr. Pro account for her birthday? I think so. Or Mother’s Day.

After that, I showed them the goodness that is Hulu.com. All of this happened after I gave them both a full tour of the new site I’m working on. Sorry, it still only lives on my computer, but you’ll hear about it as soon as it goes live.

Yet another distraction that I have right now is the gym. Getting there is a distraction that I’ve been missing this week and, as it turns out, scheduling time to get there is quite the distraction as well.

I’ve also been distracted by Apple stuff. Primarily the coolness that is the new iLife and the holy-shit-are-you-kidding-me pricing of the new 17″ MacBook Pro. I built one yesterday that came to almost $6,000! Big thanks to everyone for making fun of my toot typo/missed letter last week too. That was not nearly as awesome as you think it was. Really.

Speaking of, you might have noticed the toots have been a little light this week. Between being fairly busy and not really being able to fully appreciate the replies they have been getting either on Twitter or Facebook, I’ve slowed down a bit. Yet another distraction, this one very much unwanted.

Finally, I have 2 websites that I need to finish that aren’t work related and 1 that still needs the WP upgrade. So if I’m not around much for the next week or so, you’ll know why.

I was reading about the latest phishing scam on the Twitter blog. Out of curiosity, I thought I would see what that page looked like for myself. If it weren’t for that graphic above, it would have popped right open. As it worked out, I had to actually click through one more time to view the site. And they are bad bad people.

There is the Twitter phishing site, but if you go to the main root of that domain, they have an exact replica of Facebook as well. This site too was initially blocked by OpenDNS.

Let’s let this be a reminder to all of you out there to make the switch for you and your users. It’s quicker, it’s super reliable and safer. Bonus it’s free! You can sign-up for an account (which is also free) and get some pretty kick-ass controls if you want to do some serious site blocking. Super handy for you small-office-users-without-a-full-time-IT-guy.

Give it a go. I’m sure you’ll find your Internet experience to be greatly improved.