page titles & free-form text
As discussed in an earlier post, schmedley now offers you some cool new tools to “Personalize Your Page”. The first two we want to tell you about are the “Page Title” and ”Free-Form Text Area”. They allow you to add different sizes and types of text areas to your customized schmedley pages, and are especially useful on public pages. Public pages are ones that are designed and published by you and are available at a custom URL – i.e. schmedley.com/username. The icons that launch these new tools are pictured below…
The Page Title can be as long as you’d like (so long as you’d like it to be less than 50 characters). My page is titled: “J.R.’s Personal schpace.” Clever, no? … No.
Adding a Page Title is easy. Simply click on the “page title” text to select the area and start typing. Then, put it where you want on the page and you’re in like Flynt. What makes a tool like this great is its intuitiveness – the ability to click on the title text and “edit in place” right there on your schmedley page without new windows or “edit screens” to load or open.
The “Free-Form Text Area” allows you to enter paragraphs of text to your page. And, just like the Page Title, you can place it anywhere on your page that you’d like. A major difference from the Page Title, however, is the ability to dynamically resize the “box” that contains your text by clicking and dragging on the bottom-right corner. You can make your text boxes skinny and tall, or short and fat. Create one big content area, photo captions, multiple columns, etc. – it’s entirely up to you. And, if there is a lot of content, and it extends beyond the viewable area of “the box”, a scrollbar is automatically generated for you.
The “Free-Form Text Area” works pretty much the same way as the “Page Title”. Start by clicking the “default” text block of latin text to select the “text area” and start typing. Then, when you’re done – resize it, and place it wherever you want, and away you go.
Coming next… “Personal Photos.” Until then, Hasta la bye bye. 
NEW! – personalize & publish
Allow us to introduce you to “the other side of schmedley”…
Our new webpage creation and publishing tools.
When building in these new features, we knew we wanted to make the process as easy as possible – and – to make it virtually impossible for our users to create an ugly webpage. We decided that to do this better than other websites, we would need to have a noticeably different and elegant user experience that was streamlined and simple. And, creating a beautiful webpage takes just a few minutes.
Here’s a list of some things we DON’T have…
- giant banner ads across the top of the screen
- lots of navigation links that your visitors don’t need to see
- annoying music and video players that start playing when someone enters the page
The end result is all about YOUR content – NOT links and advertising.
To get started, click the first icon in the schmedley dock…
This loads a launcher with all of the new personalization tools (pictured below)
We’ll be giving detailed information on each of these items in a series of future blog posts, but for now, a brief introduction to these cool new page creation tools is in order – Page Title, Free-Form Text Area, Personal Photos, MP3 Player, Video Player and “Embed Any Flash”.
With these new design tools, you will be able to make schmedley truly your own, and you’ll be able to show your friends, family and the world, what you are up to, and what interests you.
In the future we plan to offer templates (for building photo galleries, blogs, resumes, etc.) that will make custom page creation even easier. So, all you’ll have to do is provide the content.
schmedley – whatever you want it to be.
Facebook Connect in schmedley
On November 30, 2008, Facebook released Facebook Connect, its newest social integration tool, to developers. Facebook Connect allows programmers to insert Facebook users’ information into their webpages, such as: name, basic profile information, profile picture, friends, photos, events, groups, and more. Websites that offer this integration will sport this snazzy little button supplied by Facebook…
We were integrating Facebook data into our Facebook schmidget in schmedley long before this, but the release of Facebook Connect made our job a whole lot easier. When it was first announced, we jumped right in – schmedley was one of the first websites using this technology – We were granted special access to the Facebook Connect API before it was “whitelisted” and released to the general (developer) public.
Some other companies/websites currently using this technology include: TechCrunch, CNET, Red Bull, Netvibes, Brightkite, Vimeo, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and CNN’s “The Forum.”
The schmedley Facebook schmidget uses this technology in three ways:
1 – All of your friends’ most recent status updates are in the main body of the schmidget…
2 – Your entire friends list is in the slide-out drawer to the right…
* Both of these areas above link directly to your friends’ pages
3 – Post status updates to your profile from the bottom drawer…
Facebook Connect is also integrated with our new page creation and publishing tools…
When you’re about to publish your new creation, one button click posts a link to your page to your Facebook status, so everyone can see what you’ve been up to on schmedley.
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