Easy Tip: Tame Your Facebook Feed with Facebook Friend Lists

facebook_friend_list_feeds

In my review of Filttr, I mentioned that Facebook features some comprehensive friend sorting and grouping tricks that Twitter sorely lacks. But the feature is only slightly obvious, so I’m going to show you an equally obvious quick tutorial on the quick way to get a reasonable Facebook feed of People You Actually Care About, and setting that as your home page, to differentiate from People You Met At That Party That One Time or That One Girl (or Guy) You Shouldn’t Have Hooked Up With Who Keeps Posting Creepy Profile Pictures Of Themselves But Blocking Them Would Only Make Things Worse.

This is really simple: When you first log into Facebook, click the down arrow next to Live Feed. Next to Friend List Feeds, click Edit Feed, click Make New List, name it something cool, and start typing the names of people you really care about. Easy. (You can also manage all of this from the Friends page, from the top nav.)

Now, if you access Facebook via a bookmark, or through the Bookmarks Toolbar, you can click on the same arrow, right click on the Friend Feed, and use that for your new bookmark.

To be fair, this feature has been around since August 2008. Disturbingly, they broke the permalink functionality about two months ago, which drove me absolutely insane because it happened to be about three weeks into having changed my primary bookmark to the Friend List Feed. Facebook Support told me that they knew it was an issue and that they were working to resolve it and it looks as if it’s finally been restored, so you can now make the first thing you see when you log into Facebook the feed of people you care about. Or your “Keeping My Enemies Closer” list. Whatever.

(Bonus: You can also use Friend Lists to send blanket messages to groups of friends. To do this, just start typing the Friend List name when composing a message.)

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Posted in: How To

HTMList.com gets a new look

As you have probably noticed, we recently unveiled the new and independent look for HTMList.com.  We wanted to establish an identity separate from our web development company so I took it upon myself to get the ball rolling last weekend and decided on a layout that I felt would work well for what we are trying to do here.  We found a great free theme over at TopWPThemes and used that as a starting point. Since then, we’ve been enhancing it bit by bit.  We hope you like it and we’re interested in hearing your feedback about likes and dislikes of the new design.  You may notice the site altering slightly over the next week or so as battles continue to rage within the office on some points of contention surrounding a few design aspects. (No more “slashdot green” for instance.)

Additionally, we look forward to releasing a couple new blogs into our blog network over the course of the next month.  We have some really exciting ideas (not to mention domain names as sexy as HTMList to deliver them on).  More on that soon, so keep your eyes to the site (or feed) for further updates.

Posted in: Announcements

Effectively boost your organic search results & make money: Blogging for SEO LOLs and $$$s

We suggest to every client we have, no matter their business or their market, to blog often about what they know. (When they don’t know much, we tell them to fake it.) <nearly-self-evident statement> Blogs are a powerful way to boost your search engine results and to drive further organic traffic to your site. </nearly-self-evident statement> I bring you through all the tasty details after the jump.

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Posted in: Development

Building your web development blog feeds: 30 sites to follow

Six Revisions has a great piece on 30 websites to follow if you’re into web development, complete with cute little screenshots that let you judge, near-fully, the quality of each site on the merits of its cover, instead of having to actually click through. (I kid.)

Among them are classics like Ajaxian, the O’Reilly Network and a bunch of others that you’ve probably not heard of but should definitely check out. (And a few we weren’t too familiar with, either.)

30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development | Six Revisions via Digg

Posted in: Development